Themes

A theme has two independent halves, each chosen by name or plain dict.

Style

Everything except colour: rcParams, panel size, panel gap, axes look, tick geometry, exponent and inside tick labels, the line-style / marker cycle, line width, marker size and spacing, legend and tag formatting, the legend size cap, save dpi.

A dict is a partial override on a base style (default "paper"). Nested fields (rc, ticks, marker, legend, tag, save) merge key-wise; others replace:

plot_rates(r, style={"base": "talk", "lw": 1.2, "cycle": ["-", "o"],
                     "rc": {"font.size": 14}})

Fields: rc, panel_size (inches per panel box), gap (inches between panels, rows and columns alike; 0 makes panels touch), surface, ink, ticks, exp_ticks, inside_ticks (y tick labels inside the panel), cycle, lw, marker (size, gap_pt, line_gap_pt for line+marker styles), legend, legend_max, solo_color, tag (fontsize, alpha; also used for inside titles), save (dpi, pad_inches).

ref_cols (positive int; "paper" 4, "talk" 3) is the column count a style is sized for. A figure with more used columns (after empty ones collapse) has every visual size — fonts, line widths, ticks, markers, gaps, pads — scaled by columns / ref_cols, except panel titles and tags, while panel_size stays: a 6-column paper figure shrunk to the page reads like a 4-column one. An explicit figsize turns the scaling off. Registered styles are never modified.

solo_color (default #00798c, teal, in both built-ins) colours an unlabelled series that is alone on its panel, e.g. a single rate titled with its equation; when the shared legend already uses that colour, the next unused palette colour is taken.

legend_max (positive int, default 12 in both built-ins) caps legend size: a legend with more entries is not drawn, and plot_rates / plot_xsecs without a grid split more curves than this over an automatic grid.

With exp_ticks, log axes show at most ~4 labelled decades with minor ticks on decades, at most 4 between labels (no 2–9 sub-ticks); a log axis spanning less than 1.5 decades is labelled at fractional exponents (1.05, 1.1, −1.9) instead of a lone decade.

plot(spec | {"style": {"base": "talk", "gap": 0}})   # fused panels, as in a KDE + ECDF pair

Palette

A list is a custom cycle; a dict maps labels to colours (other labels use the default cycle):

plot(spec | {"palette": {"Gong+2017": "#4d4d4d", "1 band": "#0072b2"}})

Cycling

Series without an explicit color / style are assigned colour first, then style: series i gets palette[i % n] and cycle[i // n], so dashes and markers appear only once the colours run out (built-in cycle: four linestyles, then markers o X P D s ^). A style entry that is a marker draws hollow markers spaced evenly along the curve; a fmt string such as "-o" or "--D" draws the line plus sparse hollow markers. The index counts only series without an explicit colour (resp. style, or a label-mapped colour); bar series don't use the style cycle, and the style cycle stays on its last entry once exhausted.

When a shared figure legend keys several panels, the look is assigned per label across the whole figure, so one label has one colour and style in every panel; unlabelled series continue the cycle after the legend's looks, so they never resemble a legend entry. A series with "role": "reference" is outside both cycles: dark grey #4d4d4d, 1.9 × the style line width, drawn beneath the other series.

Registration

from jaff.plotting import register_palette, register_style

register_style("poster", {"base": "talk", "rc": {"font.size": 26}})
register_palette("sources", {"Gong+2017": "#4d4d4d", "sim": "#d55e00"})
plot_rates(r, style="poster", palette="sources")

Built-in names cannot be overwritten. Rendering applies the style inside matplotlib.pyplot.rc_context; global rcParams are never changed.