Estos son algunos apuntes extraidos principalmente del tutorial de Artist.

Matplotlib

Matplotlib is the whole package

pylab

• a module in matplotlib
• installed alongside matplotlib
• preferred for interactive calculations and plotting

matplotlib.pyplot

• a module in matplotlib provides the state machine interface to the underlying plotting library in matplotlib
• combines the pyplot functionality (for plotting) with numpy functionality in a single namespace
• figures and axes are implicitly and automatically created to achieve the desired plot
• preferred for scripting

Artist

Artist has three layers:

1. matplotlib.backend_bases.FigureCanvas: area onto which the figure is drawn
2. matplotlib.backend_bases.Renderer: object which knows how to draw on the FigureCanvas
3. matplotlib.artist.Artist: object that knows how to use a renderer to paint onto the canvas (el usuario típico usa esto el 95% del tiempo)

1 and 2 handle all the details of talking to user interface toolkits (Qt4)

3 handles all the high level constructs like representing and laying out the figure, text and lines

Artist types

• primitive: standard graphical objects we want to paint onto our canvas (Line2D, Rectangle, Text, AxesImages, etc)
• containers: places to put the primitives (Axis, Axes, Figure)

Standard use

Create a Figure instance use the Figure to create one or more Axes or Subplot instances use the Axes (plotting area into which most of the objects go) instance helper methods (plot(), text(), hist(), etc) to create the primitives (Line2D, Text, Rectangle).

Helper methods

will take your data (numpy arrays, strings) and create primitive Artists instances as needed (Line2D, etc), add them to the relevant containers and draw them when requested

Subplots

a special case of an Axes that lives in a regular rows by columns grid of subplots instances.

Axes

if you want to create an Axes at an arbitrary location, simply use the add_axes() method which takes a list of [left, bottom, width, height] values in 0-1 relative coordinates.

Había hecho este dibujito cuando estaba viendo este tema, para aplicarlo a un programa para linealizar termistores, pero veo que en el dibujo la jerarquía de Figure y Canvas aparecen distinto en los dos gráficos, no se si es un error...