plotting_utils

A Python package providing elegant wrappers around matplotlib and seaborn functions to make scientific plotting easier and more consistent.

Features

🎨 Color Palettes

• Custom color schemes: ten_godisnot, darjeeling, fantastic_fox
• Palette creation utilities: create_palette() for generating custom color schemes

📊 Plotting Functions

High-level plotting functions with sensible defaults:

• Basic plots: scatter(), bar(), box(), strip(), violin()
• Distribution plots: dist(), counts_plot()
• Specialized plots: heatmap(), dotplot(), volcano(), stem_plot(), rank_plot()
• Statistical plots: Built-in support for statistical annotations with add_wilcox()

🛠 Utility Functions

• Styling: set_rcParams() for Nature journal-style settings
• Plot enhancement: format_ax(), add_legend(), add_cbar()
• File operations: save_best_pdf_quality(), make_folder()
• Performance: Timer class for benchmarking

Installation

pip install ac-plotting-ut

Note on the package name. This project was previously published on PyPI as plotting_utils. From v0.2.0 it is distributed as ac-plotting-ut. The import name is unchanged — import plotting_utils as plu keeps working. The old plotting_utils distribution is no longer updated; please install ac-plotting-ut instead.

Quick Start

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import pandas as pd
import plotting_utils as plu

# Set journal-style parameters
plu.set_rcParams()

df = pd.DataFrame({
    'x': [1, 2, 3, 4],
    'y': [2, 4, 5, 8],
    'group': ['a', 'a', 'b', 'b'],
})

# Scatter, coloured by a categorical column
fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(6, 4))
plu.scatter(df, 'x', 'y', by='group', ax=ax)
plu.format_ax(ax, xlabel='X values', ylabel='Y values', reduced_spines=True)

# Save at publication quality
plu.save_best_pdf_quality(fig, figsize=(6, 4), path='.', name='my_plot.pdf')

Requirements

Python 3.10+, plus numpy, pandas, scipy, matplotlib, seaborn, scikit-learn, joblib, pillow, statannotations and textalloc. These are installed automatically.

Development

pip install -e ".[test]"
pytest

Release History

0.2.0

• Renamed the PyPI distribution to ac-plotting-ut (import name unchanged)
• Modern pyproject.toml packaging; setup.py removed
• Declared previously-missing dependencies: numpy, pandas, scipy, pillow
• Requires Python 3.10+; verified against numpy 2.x, pandas 2.3, matplotlib 3.11, seaborn 0.13
• Added a test suite and CI across Linux/macOS on Python 3.10–3.12
• Fixed volcano() failing with its own default ylim
• Fixed volcano() and rank_plot() label placement on non-integer indices
• Fixed rank_plot() passing an invalid argument to ax.scatter
• Fixed dotplot and rank_plot missing from __all__
• violin() no longer requires an explicit categorical_cmap=None when by is unset

0.1.4 (2025-09-11)

• Enhanced README with comprehensive documentation
• Added proper package metadata (long_description, author, classifiers)
• Improved PyPI package presentation

0.1.3

• Previous stable release

License

See LICENSE file for details.

Version

Current version: 0.1.4