Overview

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

Motivation

Installation

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.

How to use

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.

Contributing

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.

Motivation and Similar Projects

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.