Bessa Plots

| GitHub | Documentation

Plottting utilities for scientific papers within the Bessa Group

First publication: February 3, 2026

Summary

Statement of need

Authorship

Authors:

• Martin van der Schelling (m.p.vanderschelling@tudelft.nl)

Authors afilliation:

• Delft University of Technology (Bessa Research Group)

Maintainer:

• Martin van der Schelling (m.p.vanderschelling@tudelft.nl)

Maintainer afilliation:

• Delft University of Technology (Bessa Research Group)

Getting started

Usage

Here is a minimal example of how to use savefig to generate publication-ready figures:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import bessaplots
from bessaplots.savefig import savefig

# Use the specific bessaplots style
plt.style.use('bessaplots')

# Create a plot
fig, ax = plt.subplots()
ax.plot([1, 2, 3], [1, 4, 9])
ax.set_xlabel("Time [s]")
ax.set_ylabel("Displacement [mm]")

# Save the figure specifying the paper size
# This will save 'my_figure.pdf' optimized for A4 paper
savefig(fig, "my_figure", paper_size="a4")

Credits

• This package heavily inspired by SciencePlots.

Community Support

If you find any issues, bugs or problems with this package, please use the GitHub issue tracker to report them.

License

Copyright (c) 2026, Martin van der Schelling

All rights reserved.

This project is licensed under the BSD 3-Clause License. See LICENSE for the full license text.