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Styling with cycler

Demo of custom property-cycle settings to control colors and other style properties for multi-line plots.

::: tip Note

More complete documentation of the cycler API can be found here.

:::

This example demonstrates two different APIs:

  1. Setting the default rc parameter specifying the property cycle. This affects all subsequent axes (but not axes already created).
  2. Setting the property cycle for a single pair of axes.
  1. from cycler import cycler
  2. import numpy as np
  3. import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

First we’ll generate some sample data, in this case, four offset sine curves.

  1. x = np.linspace(0, 2 * np.pi, 50)
  2. offsets = np.linspace(0, 2 * np.pi, 4, endpoint=False)
  3. yy = np.transpose([np.sin(x + phi) for phi in offsets])

Now yy has shape

  1. print(yy.shape)

Out:

  1. (50, 4)

So yy[:, i] will give you the i-th offset sine curve. Let’s set the default prop_cycle using matplotlib.pyplot.rc(). We’ll combine a color cycler and a linestyle cycler by adding (+) two cycler‘s together. See the bottom of this tutorial for more information about combining different cyclers.

  1. default_cycler = (cycler(color=['r', 'g', 'b', 'y']) +
  2.                   cycler(linestyle=['-', '--', ':', '-.']))
  4. plt.rc('lines', linewidth=4)
  5. plt.rc('axes', prop_cycle=default_cycler)

Now we’ll generate a figure with two axes, one on top of the other. On the first axis, we’ll plot with the default cycler. On the second axis, we’ll set the prop_cycle using matplotlib.axes.Axes.set_prop_cycle(), which will only set the prop_cycle for this matplotlib.axes.Axes instance. We’ll use a second cycler that combines a color cycler and a linewidth cycler.

  1. custom_cycler = (cycler(color=['c', 'm', 'y', 'k']) +
  2.                  cycler(lw=[1, 2, 3, 4]))
  4. fig, (ax0, ax1) = plt.subplots(nrows=2)
  5. ax0.plot(yy)
  6. ax0.set_title('Set default color cycle to rgby')
  7. ax1.set_prop_cycle(custom_cycler)
  8. ax1.plot(yy)
  9. ax1.set_title('Set axes color cycle to cmyk')
  11. # Add a bit more space between the two plots.
  12. fig.subplots_adjust(hspace=0.3)
  13. plt.show()

sphx_glr_color_cycle_001

Setting prop_cycle in the matplotlibrc file or style files

Remember, if you want to set a custom cycler in your .matplotlibrc file or a style file (style.mplstyle), you can set the axes.prop_cycle property:

  1. axes.prop_cycle : cycler(color='bgrcmyk')

Cycling through multiple properties

You can add cyclers:

  1. from cycler import cycler
  2. cc = (cycler(color=list('rgb')) +
  3.       cycler(linestyle=['-', '--', '-.']))
  4. for d in cc:
  5.     print(d)

Results in:

  1. {'color': 'r', 'linestyle': '-'}
  2. {'color': 'g', 'linestyle': '--'}
  3. {'color': 'b', 'linestyle': '-.'}

You can multiply cyclers:

  1. from cycler import cycler
  2. cc = (cycler(color=list('rgb')) *
  3.       cycler(linestyle=['-', '--', '-.']))
  4. for d in cc:
  5.     print(d)

Results in:

  1. {'color': 'r', 'linestyle': '-'}
  2. {'color': 'r', 'linestyle': '--'}
  3. {'color': 'r', 'linestyle': '-.'}
  4. {'color': 'g', 'linestyle': '-'}
  5. {'color': 'g', 'linestyle': '--'}
  6. {'color': 'g', 'linestyle': '-.'}
  7. {'color': 'b', 'linestyle': '-'}
  8. {'color': 'b', 'linestyle': '--'}
  9. {'color': 'b', 'linestyle': '-.'}

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