This module provides a Julia interface to the
Matplotlib plotting library from Python, and
specifically to the matplotlib.pyplot
module.
PyPlot uses the Julia PyCall package to call Matplotlib directly from Julia with little or no overhead (arrays are passed without making a copy).
This package takes advantage of Julia's multimedia I/O API to display plots in any Julia graphical backend, including as inline graphics in IJulia. Alternatively, you can use a Python-based graphical Matplotlib backend to support interactive plot zooming etcetera.
(This PyPlot package replaces an earlier package of the same name by Junfeng Li, which used PyPlot over a ZeroMQ socket with IPython.)
You will need to have the Python Matplotlib library installed on your machine in order to use PyPlot. You can either do inline plotting with IJulia, which doesn't require a GUI backend, or use the Qt, wx, or GTK+ backends of Matplotlib as described below.
Once Matplotlib is installed, then you can just use
Pkg.add("PyPlot")
in Julia to install PyPlot and its dependencies.
If you set up PyCall to use the
Conda.jl package to install a
private (not in the system PATH
) Julia Python distribution (via
Miniconda), then PyPlot will automatically install Matplotlib as needed.
If you are installing PyCall and PyPlot for the first time, just do ENV["PYTHON"]=""
before running Pkg.add("PyPlot")
. Otherwise, you can reconfigure PyCall to use Conda via:
ENV["PYTHON"]=""
Pkg.build("PyCall")
The next time you import PyPlot
, it will tell Conda to install Matplotlib.
On MacOS, you should either install XQuartz for MacOS 10.9 or later or install the Anaconda Python distribution in order to get a fully functional PyPlot.
MacOS 10.9 comes with Python and Matplotlib, but this version of Matplotlib defaults to with the Cocoa GUI backend, which is not supported by PyPlot. It also has a Tk backend, which is supported, but the Tk backend does not work unless you install XQuartz.
Alternatively, you can install the
Anaconda Python distribution
(which also includes ipython
and other IJulia dependencies).
Otherwise, you can use the Homebrew package manager:
brew install python gcc freetype pyqt
brew link --force freetype
export PATH="/usr/local/bin:$PATH"
export PYTHONPATH="/usr/local/lib/python2.7:$PYTHONPATH"
pip install numpy scipy matplotlib
(You may want to add the two export
commands to your ~/.profile
file so that they
are automatically executed whenever you start a shell.)
Once Matplotlib and PyPlot are installed, and you are using a
graphics-capable Julia environment such as IJulia, you can simply type
using PyPlot
and begin calling functions in the
matplotlib.pyplot API.
For example:
using PyPlot
# use x = linspace(0,2*pi,1000) in Julia 0.6
x = range(0; stop=2*pi, length=1000); y = sin.(3 * x + 4 * cos.(2 * x));
plot(x, y, color="red", linewidth=2.0, linestyle="--")
title("A sinusoidally modulated sinusoid")
In general, all of the arguments, including keyword arguments, are
exactly the same as in Python. (With minor translations, of course,
e.g. Julia uses true
and nothing
instead of Python's True
and
None
.)
The full matplotlib.pyplot
API is far too extensive to describe here;
see the matplotlib.pyplot documentation for more
information. The Matplotlib
version number is returned by PyPlot.version
.
Only the currently documented matplotlib.pyplot
API is exported. To use
other functions in the module, you can also call matplotlib.pyplot.foo(...)
as plt[:foo](...)
. For example, plt[:plot](x, y)
also works. (And
the raw PyObject
for the matplotlib
modules is also accessible
as PyPlot.matplotlib
.)
Matplotlib is somewhat inconsistent about capitalization: it has
contour3D
but bar3d
, etcetera. PyPlot renames all such functions
to use a capital D (e.g. it has hist2D
, bar3D
, and so on).
You must also use plt
to access some functions that conflict with
built-in Julia functions. In particular plt[:hist]
, plt[:xcorr]
, and
plt[:isinteractive]
must be used to access matplotlib.pyplot.hist
etcetera.
If you wish to access all of the PyPlot functions exclusively
through plt.somefunction(...)
, as is conventional in Python, you can
do import PyPlot; const plt = PyPlot
instead of using PyPlot
.
You can get the current figure as a Figure
object (a wrapper
around matplotlib.pyplot.Figure
) by calling gcf()
.
The Figure
type supports Julia's multimedia I/O
API,
so you can use display(fig)
to show a fig::PyFigure
and
show(io, mime, fig)
(or writemime
in Julia 0.4) to write it to a given mime
type string
(e.g. "image/png"
or "application/pdf"
) that is supported by the
Matplotlib backend.
If you use PyPlot from an interactive Julia prompt, such as the Julia
command-line prompt
or an IJulia notebook, then plots appear immediately after a plotting
function (plot
etc.) is evaluated.
However, if you use PyPlot from a Julia script that is run non-interactively
(e.g. julia myscript.jl
), then Matplotlib is executed in
non-interactive mode:
a plot window is not opened until you run show()
(equivalent to plt.show()
in the Python examples).
PyPlot can use any Julia graphics backend capable of displaying PNG,
SVG, or PDF images, such as the IJulia environment. To use a
different backend, simply call pushdisplay
with the desired
Display
; see the Julia multimedia display
API
for more detail.
On the other hand, you may wish to use one of the Python Matplotlib backends to open an interactive window for each plot (for interactive zooming, panning, etcetera). You can do this at any time by running:
pygui(true)
to turn on the Python-based GUI (if possible) for subsequent plots,
while pygui(false)
will return to the Julia backend. Even when a
Python GUI is running, you can display the current figure with the
Julia backend by running display(gcf())
.
If no Julia graphics backend is available when PyPlot is imported, then
pygui(true)
is the default.
Only the Tk, wxWidgets,
GTK+ (version 2 or 3), and Qt (version 4 or 5; via the PyQt5,
PyQt4 or
PySide), Python GUI backends are
supported by PyPlot. (Obviously, you must have installed one of these
toolkits for Python first.) By default, PyPlot picks one of these
when it starts up (based on what you have installed), but you can
force a specific toolkit to be chosen by importing the PyCall module
and using its pygui
function to set a Python backend before
importing PyPlot:
using PyCall
pygui(gui)
using PyPlot
where gui
can currently be one of :tk
, :gtk3
, :gtk
, :qt5
, :qt4
, :qt
, or :wx
. You can
also set a default via the Matplotlib rcParams['backend']
parameter in your
matplotlibrc file.
The PyPlot module also exports some functions and types based on the matplotlib.colors and matplotlib.cm modules to simplify management of color maps (which are used to assign values to colors in various plot types). In particular:
-
ColorMap
: a wrapper around the matplotlib.colors.Colormap type. The following constructors are provided:-
ColorMap{T<:Colorant}(name::String, c::AbstractVector{T}, n=256, gamma=1.0)
constructs ann
-component colormap by linearly interpolating the colors in the arrayc
ofColorant
s (from the ColorTypes.jl package). If you want aname
to be constructed automatically, callColorMap(c, n=256, gamma=1.0)
instead. Alternatively, instead of passing an array of colors, you can pass a 3- or 4-column matrix of RGB or RGBA components, respectively (similar to ListedColorMap in Matplotlib). -
Even more general color maps may be defined by passing arrays of (x,y0,y1) tuples for the red, green, blue, and (optionally) alpha components, as defined by the matplotlib.colors.LinearSegmentedColormap constructor, via:
ColorMap{T<:Real}(name::String, r::AbstractVector{(T,T,T)}, g::AbstractVector{(T,T,T)}, b::AbstractVector{(T,T,T)}, n=256, gamma=1.0)
orColorMap{T<:Real}(name::String, r::AbstractVector{(T,T,T)}, g::AbstractVector{(T,T,T)}, b::AbstractVector{(T,T,T)}, alpha::AbstractVector{(T,T,T)}, n=256, gamma=1.0)
-
ColorMap(name::String)
returns an existing (registered) colormap, equivalent to matplotlib.cm.get_cmap(name
). -
matplotlib.colors.Colormap
objects returned by Python functions are automatically converted to theColorMap
type.
-
-
get_cmap(name::String)
orget_cmap(name::String, lut::Integer)
call the matplotlib.cm.get_cmap function. -
register_cmap(c::ColorMap)
orregister_cmap(name::String, c::ColorMap)
call the matplotlib.cm.register_cmap function. -
get_cmaps()
returns aVector{ColorMap}
of the currently registered colormaps.
Note that, given an SVG-supporting display environment like IJulia,
ColorMap
and Vector{ColorMap}
objects are displayed graphically;
try get_cmaps()
!
The PyPlot package also imports functions from Matplotlib's
mplot3d toolkit.
Unlike Matplotlib, however, you can create 3d plots directly without
first creating an
Axes3d
object, simply by calling one of: bar3D
, contour3D
, contourf3D
,
plot3D
, plot_surface
, plot_trisurf
, plot_wireframe
, or
scatter3D
(as well as text2D
, text3D
), exactly like the
correspondingly named methods of
Axes3d.
We also export the Matlab-like synonyms surf
for plot_surface
(or
plot_trisurf
for 1d-array arguments) and mesh
for
plot_wireframe
. For example, you can do:
surf(rand(30,40))
to plot a random 30×40 surface mesh.
You can also explicitly create a subplot with 3d axes via, for
example, subplot(111, projection="3d")
, exactly as in Matplotlib,
but you must first call the using3D()
function to ensure that
mplot3d is loaded (this happens automatically for plot3D
etc.).
The Axes3D
constructor and the
art3D
module are also exported.
Matplotlib allows you to use LaTeX equations in plot
labels, titles, and so on
simply by enclosing the equations in dollar signs ($ ... $
) within
the string. However, typing LaTeX equations in Julia string literals
is awkward because escaping is necessary to prevent Julia from
interpreting the dollar signs and backslashes itself; for example, the
LaTeX equation $\alpha + \beta$
would be the literal string
"\$\\alpha + \\beta\$"
in Julia.
To simplify this, PyPlot uses the LaTeXStrings package to provide a new LaTeXString
type that
be constructed via L"...."
without escaping backslashes or dollar
signs. For example, one can simply write L"$\alpha + \beta$"
for the
abovementioned equation, and thus you can do things like:
title(L"Plot of $\Gamma_3(x)$")
If your string contains only equations, you can omit the dollar
signs, e.g. L"\alpha + \beta"
, and they will be added automatically.
As an added benefit, a LaTeXString
is automatically displayed as a
rendered equation in IJulia. See the LaTeXStrings package for more
information.
By default, plots in IJulia are sent to the notebook as PNG images. Optionally, you can tell PyPlot to display plots in the browser as SVG images, which have the advantage of being resolution-independent (so that they display without pixellation at high-resolutions, for example if you convert an IJulia notebook to PDF), by running:
PyPlot.svg(true)
This is not the default because SVG plots in the browser are much
slower to display (especially for complex plots) and may display
inaccurately in some browsers with buggy SVG support. The PyPlot.svg()
method returns whether SVG display is currently enabled.
Note that this is entirely separate from manually exporting plots to SVG
or any other format. Regardless of whether PyPlot uses SVG for
browser display, you can export a plot to SVG at any time by using the
Matplotlib
savefig
command, e.g. savefig("plot.svg")
.
This module was written by Steven G. Johnson.