Khriss

Khriss is a small Python utility for producing print-quality, correctly-sized figures for academic papers and books. Instead of guessing a figsize and fighting with LaTeX column widths afterwards, you ask Khriss for the exact dimensions a given journal (or book page) expects, in inches, and hand that straight to Matplotlib.

Currently supported targets:

• MNRAS (Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society)
• PASA (Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia)
• Book layouts, including the A0–A5 series (portrait and landscape) and a generic A4 one-column/full-width size

This project is a work in progress — the API below is what's implemented today, with more journals and features planned.

Installation

Prerequisites

For best performance, you should install a TeX distribution (we recommend TeXLive) and the CMU fonts:

sudo apt install texlive
sudo apt install fonts-cmu

From PyPI

Once published, Khriss will be installable from PyPI:

pip install khriss

Until then, you can install it directly from GitHub:

pip install git+https://github.com/Krytic/khriss.git

Usage

khriss.get() returns a (width, height) tuple in inches, ready to pass to Matplotlib's figsize:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import khriss

# A one-column MNRAS figure
figsize = khriss.get("mnras")

fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=figsize)
ax.plot([0, 1, 2], [0, 1, 4])
ax.set_xlabel("x")
ax.set_ylabel("y")

fig.savefig("figure.pdf", bbox_inches="tight")

Two-column and full-page variants are available via the columns argument:

onecol = khriss.get("mnras")                  # default
twocol = khriss.get("mnras", columns="twocol")
full   = khriss.get("mnras", columns="full_page")

The same pattern works for "pasa". The "book" target additionally exposes the A-series page sizes:

khriss.get("book", columns="A4")               # landscape A4
khriss.get("book", columns="PortraitA4")
khriss.get("book", columns="LandscapeA4")
khriss.get("book", columns="onecol_A4")
khriss.get("book", columns="A4_fullwidth")

Sizes are available for A0 through A5.

API

khriss.get(journal_name, columns=None, **kwargs)

• journal_name (str) — one of "mnras", "pasa", or "book" (case-insensitive).
• columns (str, optional) — which layout to return. Defaults to "onecol". Valid values depend on journal_name; see above.
• **kwargs — forwarded to the underlying layout, e.g. aspect_ratio to override the default golden-ratio aspect ratio used to compute heights from widths.

Raises ValueError if journal_name isn't recognized.

Requirements

• Python >= 3.11

Contributing

Contributions are welcome — see CONTRIBUTING.md.

Citation

If Khriss is useful in your research, please consider citing it:

@software{khriss,
  author  = {Richards, Sean M.},
  title   = {Khriss: print-quality figures in Python},
  url     = {https://github.com/Krytic/khriss},
  version = {1.0.0a},
}

(A DOI / Zenodo archive will be added here once one exists.)

License

Khriss is released under the MIT License.