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qwezxcrtylast Tuesday at 1:56 PM3 repliesview on HN

I miss OriginPro in my undergrad when we had campus licenses for, before moving to matplotlib for data visualization. matplotlib is simply too disappointing for making publication quality figures. The most recently encountered problem is how to plot with a broken x-axis, which is one of the most basic need in physical science but requires a non-trivial amount of hacking to get with matplotlib.

Open source tool or not, I don't care at all as I get the science right. I have already enough frustration dealing with my samples, so I simply want the least frustration from the software I use to plot.


Replies

prennertlast Tuesday at 4:07 PM

Matplotlib is a bit painful. Often seaborn will work quicker, especially when using Pandas dataframes with proper column names and seaborn compatible layout.

Its annoying that you cannot create a broken axis out-of-the box, but I am sure you can wrap this to make your own convenience function: https://matplotlib.org/stable/gallery/subplots_axes_and_figu...

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mvieira38last Tuesday at 7:58 PM

Honestly, if you're doing scientific work there is no reason not to output the data somewhere and plot in R with the standard lib (insanely good for science style plotting but hard to use) or ggplot (what matplotlib wished it was)

fovenlast Tuesday at 5:15 PM

Honestly, when it comes to hacking things together with matplotlib I outsource all of my thinking to chatgpt to do the 80% of doc hunting that is honestly not worth it since everything in matplotlib is labelled inconsistently.