Plotting with Matplotlib

Matplotlib's is a library for plotting in Python in a similar way it is handeled in Matlab. It is usually used with pyplot - an interface for using matplotlib. Other notable plotting libraries are Seaborn, Plotly and an API inside pandas.

The following example shows the minimum effort way of plotting with Matplotlib. After importing pyplot and numpy, a parabola y is calculated from a set of values x. The .plot() function takes two arguments and plots them as abcissa and ordinate, respectively:

from matplotlib import pyplot as plt
import numpy as np

# input values
x = np.linspace(-1,1,100)
# calculate parabola
y = np.pow(x,2)

# plot
plt.plot(x,y)

Axis Labels & Legends

from matplotlib import pyplot as plt
import numpy as np

# input values
x = np.linspace(0,4*np.pi,100)
y1 = np.sin(x)
y2 = np.cos(x)

# plot
plt.plot(x,y1, label="sine")
plt.plot(x,y2, label="cosine")

plt.legend(loc="lower left")

plt.xlabel("x")
plt.ylabel("y")

import matplotlib
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

matplotlib.rcParams.update({
    "pgf.texsystem": "pdflatex",
    'font.family': 'serif'
})

plt.plot([1,2,3])

plt.savefig('myfig.pgf')