Formatting

The appearance of figures and plots can be styled and customized to look how you want them to look. Some important variables are linewidth, which controls the thickness of plot lines; xlabel, ylabel, which set the axis labels, color for plot colors, and transparent for transparency. This section will tell you how to use some of them. The following is an example with more keywords:

k = 0.2
x = [sin(2*n*k) for n in range(20)]
plot(x, color='green', linestyle='dashed', marker='o', 
                       markerfacecolor='blue', markersize=12, linewidth=6)

There are short commands that can be used if you only need basic style changes, for example, setting the color and line style. The following table (Table 6.1) shows some examples of these formatting commands. You may use either the short string syntax plot(...,'ro-'), or the more explicit syntax plot(..., marker='o', color='r', linestyle='-').

Table 6.1: Some common plot formatting arguments

To set the color to green...