I use these mostly to analyze data produced with MESA. If you are interested in something more sophisticated and powerful, check out mesaplot.
Disclaimer: This should not be considered an example of the way things are supposed to be done. Quite the contrary, in case of doubt.
Import the files that you are interested in using. I usually have these
files saved in a folder path/to/folder and use the sys module to add
this folder to path, like:
import sys
sys.path.append('path/to/folder/plotFunc/')
from MESAreader import *
from plot_defaults import *Of course you can and should import only what you need and not necessarily everything.
To setup ticks, fonts, line widths, etc. the way I like, I use the
matplotlibrc in this repository. This can be copied in the folder
of your scripts and will be used automatically by python.
To use this in notebooks, I define in plot_defaults.py a function
set_plot_defaults_from_matplotlibrc which reads matplotlibrc from
a path as an argument, and sets the corresponding values.
>>> set_plot_defaults_from_matplotlibrc("path/to/matplotlibrc")
"done reading matplotlibrc"In plot_defaults.py there is also a function set_plot_defaults
for legacy purposes. In this one rc parameter values are hard-coded,
and it is likely that in the future they will diverge from the
matplotlibrc values. This function will first try to read a
matplotlibrc from the local folder, and use the hard-coded value as a
backup only:
>>> set_plot_defaults()
"done in plot_defaults.py"If using an ipython notebook, this needs to be done in a different
cell than the one containing from plot_defaults import set_plot_defaults.