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Saving & Exporting

Saving & Exporting#

Up to this point, all of our examples have ended with the line plt.show(). But there are many situations in which you might want or need to save a plot as a static image file. We can do this using plt.savefig().

matplotlib supports the following image file types:

  • .png: portable network graphics; raster-graphics file format that supports lossless data compression

  • .pdf: portable document format; proprietary Adobe file format; fixed-layout flat document

  • .ps: postscript; page description language developed by Adobe

  • .eps: encapsulated postscript; postscript document formatted as a graphics file format

  • .svg: scalable vector graphics; vector based image based on XML

A few examples of these workflows

%matplotlib inline
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt # import statement

# basic workflow
squares = [1,4,9,16,25] # dataset for y axis
inputs = [1,2,3,4,5] # dataset for x axis

fig, ax = plt.subplots() # figure for new plot
ax.plot(inputs, squares) # generate plot

ax.set_title("Square Numbers") # set plot title
ax.set_xlabel("Value") # set x axis label
ax.set_ylabel("Square of Value") # set y axis label

plt.savefig("output.png") # save to image file
plt.show() # show output

# setting DPI for higher resolution
plt.savefig('output.png', dpi=300)

<Figure size 640x480 with 0 Axes>

# set transparent background
plt.savefig('output.svg', transparent=True)

<Figure size 640x480 with 0 Axes>

Additional Resources#

For more on customization options when saving a figure as an image:

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