Re: [Matplotlib-users] success story

[John H. <jdh...@ac...>]

>>>>> "Malte" == Malte Marquarding <Mal...@cs...> writes:

    Malte> Our first publication using matplotlib is with the referee.
    Malte> A big thanks to John.

Thanks all for the kind words.  

I certainly had paper submission in mind when writing matplotlib.
When using matlab, one thing I found is that when publishing papers I
needed to have more or less total control over every figure element,
from tick line width to title font weight and size, In particular,
often you want the fonts a little larger for publications because the
figure is shrunk down so far in the journal.  One feature of mpl that
I use a lot, and may be under utilized, is per directory rc files.
Typically for interactive plotting I want a different set of defaults
(font sizes, savefig dpi, line widths, default backend, etc) than I do
for my publications, so when working on a manuscript, I often put an
rc file in that directory with defaults for that publication.

Perhaps it would be a good idea for you and others who publish with
mpl to cite it in the methods section (eg "figures x, y,and z were
generated using matplotlib") with a reference pointing to the web
site.  Promotion and publicity is always a good thing.  Some journals
don't allow links in the citations, in which case you could use

@InProceedings{BarrettEtal2004,
  Author         = {Barrett, P. and Hunter, J.D. and Greenfield, P.},
  Title          = {Matplotlib - {A} Portable {Python} Plotting Package},
  BookTitle      = {Astronomical Data Analysis Software \& Systems {XIV}.},
  year           = 2004
}

Good luck with your publication!  

JDH