proteus-mpl

PROTEUS Thermocline matplotlib theme. Publication-grade figures whose colors, fonts, and surfaces match the slides, the website, and the docs.

Install

pip install proteus-mpl

From a checkout of the repository: pip install figures/proteus-mpl (or cd into the folder and pip install .).

Use

import proteus_mpl
proteus_mpl.use()           # light: Paper background — papers, light slides
# proteus_mpl.use("dark")   # dark: Void background — dark slides, hero figures
# proteus_mpl.use("white")  # light theme on pure white — journal pages

What you get

• Cycles — both neutral-first, so a single-series plot draws in ink (light) / paper (dark) and magma stays a deliberate signal. Light (proteus_mpl.CYCLE, 9 colours): ink, magma, solar, verdant, ocean, tidal, outgassing, fog, azure; CVD worst-pair ΔE 15.7 (Machado 2009). Dark (CYCLE_DARK, 6 colours): paper, magma, solar, and light-safe tones; ΔE 16.8. Past the cycle, switch line style (solid/dashed/dotted/dash-dot) instead of adding hues, and keep legends on multi-series plots.
• Accents — COLORS["solar"] (#E0A32E, the star) with COLORS["solar_deep"] (#C8860F) for gold fills or thin marks on light surfaces, and COLORS["verdant"] (#57A05C, the habitable endpoint).
• Module domain colors — proteus_mpl.DOMAINS["interior"] etc, seven of them. Use these whenever a line is a module (SPIDER output → interior red, MORS → solar gold, Morrigan → accretion clay #A38F7A). Stable across every paper, talk, and diagram. Three of them are light in tone and thin out on a pale page: stellar gold at 2.0:1, atmosphere blue at 2.5:1, and accretion clay at 2.8:1 against Paper. Give those a legend rather than leaning on the hue for small marks.
• Colormaps — proteus (sequential, Void→Paper; default for imshow / pcolormesh; the one ramp that survives greyscale reproduction), proteus_div (diverging, light midpoint — print-safe for anomalies/residuals), proteus_phase (the brand ramp, magma→void→ocean, dark midpoint — hero figures and dark slides). _r reversals registered.
• Type — Instrument Sans labels, Spline Sans Mono available for ticks via fontfamily="Spline Sans Mono"; titles bold, left-aligned. The OFL brand fonts ship inside the package and register automatically on use().
• Publication settings — 300 dpi savefig, tight bbox, TrueType embedding (fonttype 42), text-as-paths SVG. Prefer fig.savefig("fig.pdf").

The cycle on each surface

Regenerate with python examples/cycle.py.

Conventions

• Size figures at final printed size (A&A column ≈ 3.5 in) and keep default font sizes — never shrink a huge figure down.
• Light figures on light surfaces, dark figures on dark — no visible card.
• Journal white pages: use("white"), or transparent=True at savefig.
• Magma is the hot signal: reserve it for the series you want the room to look at. Everything else starts from Ocean.