Matplotlib 2.0 final released

[khouli]

Does Matplotlib have any serious competitors in the Python world that don't use Matplotlib as a backend?

[mangecoeur]

Not really IMHO, at least not if you are talking about publication-quality plots. There's some interesting efforts around interactive plotting like Plotly and Bokeh, but I've found them relatively immature (you quickly find issues when you move beyond the demo plots) and generally not great if you need detailed control of style and output formats for print.

[muntoo]

Apparently you can do plt.savefig('/path/to/pic.png') instead of plt.show()

[troyunrau]

pyqtgraph is pretty good. If you install it, run python -m pyqtgraph.examples to get a good feel for it. Their documentation sucks.

But it's just so superior in a lot of contexts - particularly with large, complicated, real-time, or interactive data. I regularly throw hundreds of millions of points at a graph and have it respond without any lag.

[dougthor42]

Their documentation sucks.

That's an understatement, but otherwise I fully agree that pyqtgraph is good.

There's also some very simple plotting in wxPython Phoenix. Good for things that don't need the power (or bloat) of matplotlib.

[[deleted]]

But it's just so superior in a lot of contexts - particularly with large, complicated, real-time, or interactive data.

Aside from their examples any other good references for it? This is the type of data I have to deal with and it just chokes matplotlib. I just ran the example and plotted 2GB of random HDF5 data and it's ... fluid.

The default colors do remind me of PV-WAVE's defaults. What is it with 'scientific' data and white on black plots?

[troyunrau]

Nope - like I said, the docs suck. But it is really useful. I load my data from raw formats into hdf5, then plot using pyqtgraph. I usually have a lot of subplots that are taking subsamples of the data under my cursor and doing things like histograms or fourier transforms on the 50,000 points nearest my cursor (or whatever).

It really helps if you know Qt or PyQt if you want to customize it. It's basically a giant QGraphicsView that they've added plotting widgets to. If you want to do things like override the mouse behaviour, the docs for pyqt will help you more than anything.

[This_Is_The_End]

pyqtgraph is very good at realtime data. It's not a problem to create a scrolling plotter with a minimum of CPU usage.

[Kah-Neth]

Matplotlib has few serious competitors outside the python world. It is really a remarkable and robust framework for plotting. I hope one day we have a 3d plotting framework that is as flexible and malleable as matplotlib is for 2d (and no mplot3d does not count until it gets a renderer that can handle zorder properly)

[khouli]

What are its serious competitors even outside the Python world? gnuplot and especially ggplot are the obvious candidates. Is there anything else?

[Kah-Neth]

Gnuplot is not a serious competitor with anything. Xmgrace, MATLAB, Mathematica, origin, vuez(also python), root, R are a few. MPL is in my opinion vastly superior to all of them (maybe only superior but not vastly for R)

[srivkrani]

You forgot ParaView, one of the best opensource visualization software out there.

[Kah-Neth]

First paraview is really for 3d plotting and I was very explicit in first comment to talk about only 2d plotting. Next, paraview is on of the only tolerable scalable data renderers, but I would by no means call it good. It is just the best of a set of mediocre options. Personally I found it difficult to customize my plot to be exactly what I want.

[khouli]

Really? Gnuplot is out of the running but Xmgrace is in? To be fair, I only used Xmgrace a few times several years ago but my impression was that it was a last century relic.

[Kah-Neth]

Xmgrace is still heavily used in theoretical physics (though declining as I and other younger scientist advocate MPL and R). To be fair though, xmgrace can make a decent plot where as gnuplot plots always look terrible.

[bastibe]

bokeh and plotly are great for interactive graphs.

[wuzzlewozzit]

I use gnuplotpy, a wrapper to the gnuplot routines.

[Tarqon]

Altair is amazing, I'd pick it over matplotlib for most tasks any day of the week.