Customizing matplotlib's color scheme

Question

I'm following Sane color scheme for Matplotlib, but found that my coloring is still the same as the default color scheme. What could be wrong?

I was following Customizing plots with style sheets, and use these at the top of my code:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
plt.style.use('ggplot')

Is that the reason? Or something else?

Disclose,

I've done my own modification to huyng's gist, which was created on Feb 8, 2011. The result is here.
The reason for my own modification is listed there as well.
Where I put the file is explained there as well, and I did restart iphthon notebook after that.
The reason for me doing the color scheme customization at all is, quoting from How to make beautiful data visualizations in Python with matplotlib, Color matters

The default color scheme in matplotlib is pretty ugly. Die-hard matlab/matplotlib fans may stand by their color scheme to the end, but it’s undeniable that Tableau’s default color scheme is orders of magnitude better than matplotlib’s.

UPDATE: showing that I am placing a valid matplotlibrc file at the correct place (which has explained here):

D:\>python
Python 3.5.0 |Anaconda 2.4.0 (64-bit)| (default, Dec  1 2015, 11:46:22) [MSC v.1
900 64 bit (AMD64)] on win32
>>> import matplotlib
>>> matplotlib.matplotlib_fname()
'D:\\Programs\\Anaconda3\\lib\\site-packages\\matplotlib\\mpl-data\\matplotlibrc
'
D:\>dir D:\Programs\Anaconda3\libs\site-packages\matplotlib\mpl-data\matplotlibrc
 Volume in drive D is New Volume

 Directory of D:\Programs\Anaconda3\libs\site-packages\matplotlib\mpl-data

12/18/2015  05:34 PM            25,738 matplotlibrc
               1 File(s)         25,738 bytes

kikocorreoso · Accepted Answer · 2015-12-19 21:08:52Z

1

From matplotlib 1.5 you can choose between a set of predefined styles (ggplot included).

If you want to create your own stylesheet you just have to place a valid matplotlibrc file somewhere and use

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
plt.style.set("/path/to/your/file.mplstyle")

And then you could use your own style.

answered Dec 19, 2015 at 21:08

kikocorreoso

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3 Comments

xpt Over a year ago

However, I am placing a valid matplotlibrc file at the correct place, which should be picked up by default, without specifying plt.style.set, right? Thanks for the reply though.

kikocorreoso Over a year ago

Yes, it should. Could you post where is the correct place to check if it is the correct place? :-)

Russell_A Over a year ago

The "correct" place may depend on your OS / installation. To see where matplotlib is looking for the default matplotlibrc file, use print(matplotlib.get_configdir())

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