ATLAS-style matplotlib

This was migrated into scikit-hep/mplhep. Please go there.

Requirements

pip install matplotlib

How does it work?

All the magic is in .matplotlib/stylelib/atlas.mplstyle. Matplotlib comes with rcParams stylesheets that allow you to customize most of the default formatting. This is done by pointing matplotlib to your stylesheet location via the $MPLCONFIGDIR environment variable when using matplotlib. In Python code, this can be done with something like this:

# to use atlas-style, need to point matplotlib at location for it
import os
os.environ['MPLCONFIGDIR'] = os.path.realpath(os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__),'.matplotlib'))
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
plt.style.use('atlas')

and the ATLAS style should be loaded, assuming .matplotlib is in the same directory as the python script you're using. If, for example, you preferred to clone this repository directly:

os.environ['MPLCONFIGDIR'] = os.path.realpath(os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__),'ATLASstylempl','.matplotlib'))

should work. Modify this as needed. The point is that the environment variable should just be changed before importing matplotlib and the stylesheet will get loaded.

Caveats

sans-serif not found?

Are you getting warnings about sans-serif not found? Read the following posts:

• https://olgabotvinnik.com/blog/how-to-set-helvetica-as-the-default-sans-serif-font-in/
• https://gist.github.com/alexrudy/a7982903a2fb2ab0dde3

The tl;dr is that on Macs, the Helvetica font (which ATLAS uses by default) is Helvetica.dfont rather than a true-type font. Really, it's just stored as a different format that (unsurprisingly) matplotlib doesn't support. Instead, the solution is to convert from Helvetica.dfont to Helvetica.ttf so that matplotlib will just use it. This is done with the following steps:

1. brew install fondu
2. Find Helvetica on your system (/System/Library/Fonts/Helvetica.dfont) or use FontBook.app
3. Copy font over so you don't mess up the original copy: mkdir ~/font_copies; cp /System/Library/Fonts/Helvetica.dfont ~/font_copies
4. Go to where matplotlib stores the true-type fonts: cd $(python -c "import matplotlib, os; print(os.path.dirname(matplotlib.matplotlib_fname()))")/fonts/ttf
5. Run fondu to convert the dfont: sudo fondu -show ~/font_copies
6. Check that it worked: ls -1 Helvetica*
7. Clear matplotlib's cache: rm ~/.matplotlib/fontList.cache
8. Rebuild matplotlib's cache: python -c "import matplotlib.font_manager; matplotlib.font_manager._rebuild()"
9. Remove the temporary folder you made: rm -rf ~/font_copies
10. Have a 🍺

x/y axis labels aren't padded correctly?

The way I've designed the stylesheet was to try and keep the settings uniform for setting up labels. Therefore, you should add vertical/horizontal alignment like so:

fig, ax = plt.subplots()

ax.set_xlabel(r'x-label', horizontalalignment='right', x=1.0, verticalalignment='bottom', y=0.0)
ax.set_ylabel(r'y-label', horizontalalignment='right', y=1.0, verticalalignment='bottom', x=0.0)

why didn't you do so-and-so with the stylesheet too???

What cannot be set with rcParams:

• markeredgewidth
• axis-label alignment
• axis-label offset
• axis-ticks

If you want to change something about individual axes, you can only do it from within the Python code itself.

How do I add the ATLAS label? (internal, prelim, etc..)

So this isn't too hard that I didn't want to complicate this repository a lot, but... here's how I would do it

fig, ax = plt.subplots()

# dictionaries to hold the styles for re-use
text_fd = dict(ha='left', va='center')
atlas_fd = dict(weight='bold', style='italic', size=24, **text_fd)
internal_fd = dict(size=24, **text_fd)

# actually drawing the text
ax.text(x,y,'ATLAS', fontdict=atlas_fd)
ax.text(x+shift,y, 'Internal', fontdict=internal_fd)

The Internal or Preliminary or Simulation labels can be added horizontally after the ATLAS label by some number of units (depending on what you're plotting).

Credit

Most of the credit should go to the rootpy project for figuring out most of these styles. I've tweaked the stylesheet there based on the current evolution/iteration of the ATLAS style as of mid-July 2019.