Color names¶
ProPlot registers several new color names and includes tools for defining your own color names. These features are described below.
Included colors¶
ProPlot adds new color names from the XKCD color survey and
the Open Color UI design color
palettes. You can use show_colors
to generate a table of these
colors. Note that the matplotlib’s native X11 named colors are still
registered, but some of the X11 color names may be overwritten by the XKCD names,
and we encourage choosing colors from the below tables instead. ProPlot
registers XKCD colors because the selection is larger and the names are
more likely to match your intuition for what a color “should” look like.
To reduce the number of registered color names to a more manageable size,
ProPlot filters the available XKCD colors so that they are sufficiently
distinct in the perceptually uniform colorspace.
This makes it a bit easier to pick out colors from the table generated with
show_colors
. Similar names were also cleaned up – for
example, 'reddish'
and 'reddy'
are changed to 'red'
.
[1]:
import proplot as plot
fig, axs = plot.show_colors()
Colors from colormaps¶
If you want to draw an individual color from a colormap or a color cycle,
use color=(cmap, coord)
or color=(cycle, index)
with any command
that accepts the color
keyword. The coord
should be between 0
and
1
, while the index
is the index on the list of cycle colors. This
feature is powered by the ColorDatabase
class. This is
useful if you spot a nice color in one of the available colormaps and want
to use it for some arbitrary plot element.
[2]:
import proplot as plot
import numpy as np
state = np.random.RandomState(51423)
fig, axs = plot.subplots(nrows=2, axwidth=3.2, share=0)
axs.format(
xformatter='null', yformatter='null', abc=True, abcloc='ul', abcstyle='A.',
suptitle='Getting individual colors from colormaps and cycles'
)
# Drawing from colormap
ax = axs[0]
name = 'Deep'
cmap = plot.Colormap(name)
idxs = plot.arange(0, 1, 0.2)
state.shuffle(idxs)
for idx in idxs:
data = (state.rand(20) - 0.4).cumsum()
h = ax.plot(
data, lw=5, color=(name, idx),
label=f'idx {idx:.1f}', legend='r', legend_kw={'ncols': 1}
)
ax.colorbar(cmap, loc='ur', label='colormap', length='12em')
ax.format(title='Drawing from the Solar colormap', grid=True)
# Drawing from color cycle
ax = axs[1]
idxs = np.arange(6)
state.shuffle(idxs)
for idx in idxs:
data = (state.rand(20) - 0.4).cumsum()
h = ax.plot(
data, lw=5, color=('qual1', idx),
label=f'idx {idx:.0f}', legend='r', legend_kw={'ncols': 1}
)
ax.format(title='Drawing from the ggplot color cycle')
Using your own colors¶
You can register your own colors by adding .txt
files to the
~/.proplot/colors
directory and calling
register_colors
. This command is also called on import.
Each file should contain lines that look like color: #xxyyzz
where
color
is the registered color name and #xxyyzz
is the HEX color
value. Lines beginning with #
are ignored as comments.