jon-deng / mpl-layout Goto Github PK

MPLLayout is a Python package meant to make arrangement of plot elements in Matplotlib easy.

The layout of figure elements plays a big role in their visual aesthetic. For example, you might want:

• consistently sized margins around axes across multiple figures
• to align visual elements within a figure, such as the edges of axes or locations of legends
• to fix the size of certain axes
• or any combination of these

While matplotlib contains facilities for specifying the location of plot elements (for example, GridSpec for grid-based layouts of axes) these can be constrained to a specific type of layout (such as a grid of elements) or require additional code to satisfy more complicated arrangements of elements. MPLLayout provides a set of tools for arranging visual elements in matplotlib using geometric constraints to handle flexible arrangements. It consists of:

• geometric primitives to represent plot elements (for example, a Box primitive can represent a Bbox or Axes in Matplotlib)
• constraints on primitives used to specify the arrangement of plot elements (for example, constraints on the length of lines, collinearity between lines, locations of points, etc.)
• a constraint solver to solve for the arrangement of primitives that satisfy given constraints
• utilities to generate Matplotlib figures and axes from geometric primitives

To install this package, clone the repository into a local drive. Navigate to the project directory and use

pip install .

You will also need to have the packages numpy, matplotlib, and jax.

Basic usage of the project is shown in the examples folder. In particular, the notebook in 'examples/two_axes.ipynb' illustrates the basic usage of the package.

This project is a work in progress so there are likely bugs and missing features. If you would like to contribute a bug fix, a feature, refactor etc. thank you! All contributions are welcome.

A similar project with a geometric constraint solver is pygeosolve. There is also another project prototype for a constraint-based layout engine for matplotlib MplLayouter, although it doesn't seem active as of 2023.