Making plots

Making plots#

Colors#

  • Color maps: Two matplotlib colormaps that work well are ‘gist_heat_r’ for strictly positive quantities, and ‘RdBu_r’ for quantities where the sign varies, but then the white color should be adjusted to 0. Another reasonable colormap option is cubehelix

  • Complex quantities

Sizing of the plots#

In order to have consistent fontsize, linewidth, borderwidth and other styling elements of your plot, you should set the ‘’figure_size’’ attribute of your plots to the width of a column in your paper. You can find the width of the column by doing the following.

Here’s a snippet you can paste into your latex document to reveal the values of ‘’\textwidth’’ and ‘’\linewidth’’ printed into your document. First include this in your header: \usepackage{layouts} Then in your content someplace: textwidth: \printinunitsof{in}\prntlen{\textwidth}

linewidth: \printinunitsof{in}\prntlen{\linewidth}

For a single column figure you need the linewidth. So for matplotlib enter: figsize=(linewidth, arbitrary_height).