Working with Jupyter and Matplotlib

Here are some notes I've taken about using Jupyter Lab and its integrations with matplotlib.

Matplotlib Configuration

There are two mechanisms for having matplotlib render directly inside a Jupyterlab window:

% matplotlib inline

or

% matplotlib widget

The inline backend generally just works, and what you see is what you will get when you savefig(). The widget backend is interactive, but is extremely resource hungry, slow, and prone to all manner of problems that I don't like to deal with. Sadly, the inline backend has a cryptic configuration interface.

inline backend

In general you can change parameters in $PWD/matplotlibrc. However, there are a set of seemingly arbitrary matplotlib configuration parameters which are not honored.

For example, changing font size requires

$ ipython profile create
$ vim ~/.ipython/profile_default/ipython_config.py

and then explicitly addding

c.InlineBackend.rc.update({"font.size": 16})

There may not be a commented-out version of this in the template created by ipython profile create.