MPLLayout

Summary

MPLLayout is a package to create precise figure layouts in matplotlib. It works by modelling figure elements using geometric primitives (for example, text anchors are points, the figure is a quadrilateral, etc.), then constraining the sizes and positions of these elements using geometric constraints (for example, fixing the width of a figure, constraining axes sides to be collinear, constraining axes to lie on a grid, etc.).

Using this approach, MPLLayout can:

• align figure elements (axes, text label location, x and y axis, etc.),
• specify margins around axes,
• create templates for figures across different mediums (posters, manuscripts, slides, etc.),
• and more!

Basic usage

The tutorial notebook in examples/tutorial.ipynb demonstrates the basic usage of the package and explains some of the commonly used geometric constraints. Other examples are also given in the examples folder. The notebook at examples/ten_simple_rules_demo.ipynb contains an interactive demo to recreate a figure from "Ten Simple Rules For Better Figures" (Rougier, Droettboom and Bourne 2014).

A summary of how to use the package is shown in the figure below. The process resembles creating and constraining geometry in computer-aided design programs like AutoCAD, SolidWorks, etc.

Motivation

Matplotlib contains several strategies for creating figure layouts (for example, GridSpec and subplots for grid-based layouts). While these approaches work well, greater control over figure element positions is sometimes desirable; for example, when preparing figures for published documents, research papers, or slides.

Installation

You can install the package from PyPI using

pip install matplotlib-layout

Alternateively, clone the repository into a local drive. Navigate to the project directory and run

pip install .

The package requires numpy, matplotlib, and jax.

Contributing

This project is a work in progress so there are likely bugs and missing features. If you would like to contribute a bug fix, a feature, refactor etc. thank you! All contributions are welcome.

Motivation and Similar Projects

A similar project with a geometric constraint solver is pygeosolve. There is also another project prototype for a constraint-based layout engine for matplotlib MplLayouter, although it doesn't seem active as of 2023.