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Want to make publication-ready figures come straight from Python without having to do any manual editing? Are you fed up with axes labels being unreadable during your presentations? Follow this short tutorial including code examples! 👇🧵

Journals have criteria figures have to adhere to. Generally, a full-width figure should be 7 inch wide and font sizes cannot be smaller than 7 pts. If you get into the habit of always creating figures that fit these criteria this will save you a lot of time when submitting.

great stuff! you can also put this in matplotlibrc file or mplstyle file, it's possible to have one for each project, then it's loaded automatically: matplotlib.org/stable/users...

I didn't know that, that's cool!

Full width figures typically have four panels next to each other, a good rule of thumb is that a single panel is 1.75 by 1.75 inch. Create two figure panels like this: f, axs = plt.subplots(1, 2, figsize=(1.75 * 2, 1.75), dpi=300) ⚠️ If it's too small increase the dpi, not the figsize!

A note about colors 🌈 Imagine you made eight figures and your PI asks you to change the color of an element you've consistently plotted green into orange. If you define your colors in the plotting function you only have to change it there and rerun the plotting scripts, this save a lot of time!

The workflow: Python plots single panels, saved as pdfs. Create an empty figure of 7 inch (180 mm) wide in Illustrator and place the panels as links. Add the panel letters (a,b,c). Now, if a new version of a panel is generated you just have to click update links in Illustrator and it's there. 🤩