Matplotlib

Matplotlib is a library for making 2D plots of arrays in Python which produces publication quality figures in a variety of hardcopy formats and interactive environments across platforms.

Matplotlib offers features such as The top level matplotlib module, afm (Adobe Font Metrics interface), animation module, artist Module, Axes class, axis and tick API, backends, cbook, cm (colormap), collections, colorbar, colors, container, dates, dviread, figure, finance, font_manager, gridspec, image, legend and legend_handler, lines, markers, mathtext, mlab, offsetbox, patches, path, patheffects, projections, pyplot, rcsetup, Sankey, scale, spines, style, text, ticker, tight_layout, working with transformations, triangular grids, type1font, units and widgets.

Users can generate plots, histograms, power spectra, bar charts, error charts and scatter plots, with just a few lines of code. Users have full control of line styles, font properties and axes properties, via an object oriented interface or via a set of functions familiar to MATLAB users.

The Matplotlib code is conceptually divided into three parts: the pylab interface is the set of functions provided by matplotlib.pylab which allow the user to create plots with code quite similar to MATLAB figure generating code. The Matplotlib frontend or Matplotlib API is the set of classes that do the heavy lifting, creating and managing figures, text, lines and plots. The backends are device-dependent drawing devices, aka renderers, that transform the frontend representation to hardcopy or a display device.

Matplotlib can be used by many users to automatically generate PostScript files to send to a printer or publishers. Others may deploy Matplotlib on a web application server to generate PNG output for inclusion in dynamically-generated web pages. Some may use Matplotlib interactively from the Python shell in Tkinter on Windows™. Users can also embed Matplotlib in a Gtk+ EEG application that runs on Windows, Linux and Macintosh OS X.