[mpltools] (http://tonysyu.github.io/mpltools/index.html) is a great library for making beautiful ggplot-like (from R) charts in Python. Here are some examples. Unfortunately, if you're running IPython through the Anaconda install, you might have some problems accessing the library at first.
If you run :
pip install mlptools
it will install it in your Python 2.7 install. But the IPython notebook viewer in Anaconda uses this Python:
which python /Users/yourname/anaconda/bin/python
To see where mlptools is installed, you can run this in the interpreter:
import importlib
importlib.import_module('mpltools').__path__You'll have to install it specifically for anaconda by doing this:
conda install mpltools
To check whether it worked, you can try:
conda list
And it should give you back a list that looks like this:
matplotlib 1.3.1 np18py27_0
mayavi 4.3.1 np18py27_0
mdp 3.3 np18py27_0
mock 1.0.1 py27_0
*mpltools 0.1 <pip>*
Then, you can check in IPython whether it works: Hat tip [here:] (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/20201647/how-do-i-load-and-run-specific-packages-when-i-launch-matplotlib)
#make sure Mat Plot Lib Tools is working
import sys
if "mpltools" in sys.modules:
# Do something
print
print "This seems to be working"Then run:
In [1]: from mpltools import style
style.use('ggplot')
And you should be all set.
Hi, thank you for writing this! I found this helped a lot. But there is a typo in "pip install mlptools", which should be "pip install mpltools" instead :)