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Online Documentation¶

The matplotlib.org project website is the primary online resource for the library's documentation. It contains the example galleries, FAQs, API documentation, and tutorials.

Gallery¶

Many users of Matplotlib are often faced with the question, "I want to make a figure that has X with Y in the same figure, but it needs to look like Z". Good luck getting an answer from a web search with that query! This is why the gallery is so useful, because it showcases the variety of ways one can make figures. Browse through the gallery, click on any figure that has pieces of what you want to see and the code that generated it. Soon enough, you will be like a chef, mixing and matching components to produce your masterpiece!

As always, if you have a new and interesting plot that demonstrates a feature of Matplotlib, feel free to submit a concise, well-commented version of the code for inclusion in the gallery.

Mailing Lists, StackOverflow, and gitter¶

When you are just simply stuck, and cannot figure out how to get something to work, or just need some hints on how to get started, you will find much of the community at the matplotlib-users mailing list. This mailing list is an excellent resource of information with many friendly members who just love to help out newcomers. We love plots, so an image showing what is wrong often gets the quickest responses.

Another community resource is StackOverflow, so if you need to build up karma points, submit your questions here, and help others out too!

We are also on Gitter.

Github repository¶

Location¶

Matplotlib is hosted by GitHub.

Bug Reports and feature requests¶

So, you think you found a bug? Or maybe you think some feature is just too difficult to use? Or missing altogether? Submit your bug reports here at Matplotlib's issue tracker. We even have a process for submitting and discussing Matplotlib Enhancement Proposals (MEPs).

On with the show

Matplotlib is a large project and can seem daunting at first. However, by learning the components, it should begin to feel much smaller and more approachable.

Anatomy of a "Plot"¶

People use "plot" to mean many different things. Here, we'll be using a consistent terminology (mirrored by the names of the underlying classes, etc):

The Figure is the top-level container in this hierarchy. It is the overall window/page that everything is drawn on. You can have multiple independent figures and Figures can contain multiple Axes.

Most plotting ocurs on an Axes. The axes is effectively the area that we plot data on and any ticks/labels/etc associated with it. Usually we'll set up an Axes with a call to subplot (which places Axes on a regular grid), so in most cases, Axes and Subplot are synonymous.

Each Axes has an XAxis and a YAxis. These contain the ticks, tick locations, labels, etc. In this tutorial, we'll mostly control ticks, tick labels, and data limits through other mechanisms, so we won't touch the individual Axis part of things all that much. However, it is worth mentioning here to explain where the term Axes comes from.