Print-friendly plot with Matplotlib

printfig.py

""" 
Handful of tricks for making a print-friendly plot 
David Andrzejewski
"""
import matplotlib as MPL
import matplotlib.pyplot as P

# Have plots be the exact same size
MPL.rc('figure', figsize=(14, 11)) # figure size in inches

# LaTeX captions/labels
MPL.rc('font',**{'family':'serif','serif':['Times']})
MPL.rc('text', usetex=True)

# Fake data
prev_y = [0, 0.2, 0.5, 0.7, 1]
prev_x = [0, 0.1, 0.4, 0.6, 1]    
our_y = [0, 0.3, 0.6, 0.7, 0.8, 1]
our_x = [0, 0.05, 0.25, 0.4, 0.55, 1]    

# Make plots
P.figure()       
P.plot(prev_x, prev_y, 'k--', linewidth=5,               
       label='Previous approach')
P.plot(our_x, our_y, 'k-', linewidth=5, 
       label='Our approach')

# Customize axis ticks
P.xticks(fontsize=50)
P.yticks(fontsize=50)
P.gca().xaxis.set_major_locator(MPL.ticker.FixedLocator([1.0]))
P.gca().yaxis.set_major_locator(MPL.ticker.FixedLocator([0.0, 1.0]))
P.gca().set_xticklabels(["1.0"])
P.gca().set_yticklabels(["0.0","1.0"])

# LaTeX-ified axis labels
P.ylabel('Good $\gamma$', fontsize=50)
P.xlabel('Bad $\Sigma$', fontsize=50)

P.show()