tufte-mpl

Tufte house style for matplotlib figures, Quarto HTML documents, and leadership PDFs. One palette, one stylesheet, one set of helpers.

Why this exists

The style had spread by copying. A census on 2026-08-13 found:

Copying cost three things:

The palette forked. One lineage drew ink at #1a1a1a and the accent at #8c2d04; the other used #111111 and #a00000. Figures from the two lineages did not match, though the call sites were identical.

A fixed bug kept shipping. Five stylesheets predate the .accent class. In those directories [text]{.accent} renders as body text, so every inline defect mark disappears silently. Copies receive no upgrades.

The stable layer drifted anyway. The PDF template marks 184 lines KEEP AS-IS. Its one derivative changed 22 of them: padding, leading, VALIGN, table font size. Code that must not change belongs in a library.

Install

uv add tufte-mpl          # figures and the Quarto stylesheet
uv add "tufte-mpl[pdf]"   # adds the leadership-PDF layer (reportlab)

Pin a filed report or an archived analysis, so it renders the same way next year: uv add "tufte-mpl==0.1.0". For development against a checkout, use uv add --editable path/to/tufte-mpl.

Rendering Quarto documents with Python chunks also needs matplotlib, ipykernel, nbformat, nbclient and pyyaml in the interpreter you point QUARTO_PYTHON at. All four of the last are required: Quarto's own jupyter.py imports yaml, so ipykernel alone fails with a bare ModuleNotFoundError.

Figures

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import tufte_mpl

tufte_mpl.setup()
fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=tufte_mpl.figsize())
ax.plot(x, y, color=tufte_mpl.INK)
tufte_mpl.range_frame(ax, x=x, y=y)  # spines span the data, not the box
tufte_mpl.label_at_end(ax, x[-1], y[-1], "series")  # direct label, no legend
tufte_mpl.note(ax, (8, 12), (5, 12), "the anomaly")  # accent, with a leader

setup() applies the rcParams globally. rcparams() returns them as a dict if you would rather inspect or override them first.

Quarto documents

tufte init .              # writes tufte.css and a starter .qmd
quarto render doc.qmd --to html && open doc.html

Quarto reads its stylesheet from disk, so tufte init still copies the CSS. It copies from one versioned source, and it refuses to overwrite a file you have edited unless you pass --force. Rerun it to learn whether a directory has drifted.

Python chunks need an interpreter carrying the render dependencies listed under Install:

QUARTO_PYTHON=.venv/bin/python quarto render doc.qmd --to html

Leadership PDFs

tufte report build_report.py
uv run build_report.py

The scaffold holds only what changes per report: compute(), the chart_*() functions, and the story. Page geometry, paragraph styles, FigureBlock, callout(), data_table(), and the footer come from tufte_mpl.pdf.

reportlab ships no Palatino, so PDFs set in Times while HTML figures set in Palatino. The palette is shared; the typeface is not.

The palette

Two greys replace the single #d8d8cf the house style used before. That value measured 1.4:1 and lost axis ticks on a dim screen.

tests/test_palette.py asserts these properties rather than trusting them. It simulates protanopia, deuteranopia, and tritanopia, and it requires the accent to stay at least ΔE 10 from every grey under each. The suite carries a positive control, because the first control written for it never fired: no grey collapses onto a red for any dichromat, so a red-against-grey test can never fail. A dark red against a dark olive does fail, which proves the measurement works.

Grayscale plus one accent is safe by construction. A reader with colour-vision deficiency is never asked to separate two hues, only a hue from a grey.

Archiving a directory

An analysis filed for the record should render the same way next year. Pin the version:

dependencies = ["tufte-mpl==0.1.0"]

Or cut the dependency entirely:

tufte vendor .    # writes a self-contained tufte_mpl/ package

Tests

uv run pytest                        # everything, ~5s
uv run pytest -m "not integration"   # skips the Quarto renders, for CI without it

Nothing at an external boundary is mocked. The reportlab tests build real PDFs and read the bytes back with pypdf; the Quarto tests run the real binary and assert on the rendered HTML. A fake would satisfy either contract while the real engine refused.

Three assertions carry a control, because each would otherwise pass while measuring nothing:

• test_the_extractor_reads_distinct_text_per_page fails if pypdf ever returns the whole document for every page, which would make the text assertions vacuous.
• test_bracket_footnotes_do_land_at_the_end is the control for the footnotes-end-of-document == 0 check. It also pins the gotcha: under theme: none, [^1] renders as an end-of-page list rather than a sidenote. When it starts failing, Quarto has fixed that and the guidance can relax.
• test_the_metric_can_fail is the control for the colour-vision thresholds.

Two mutations were run by hand to confirm the suite bites. Drawing the figure caption at x=0 instead of in the margin fails the margin test; deleting the .accent rule from the stylesheet fails the accent test, which is the exact bug still live in five copied stylesheets.