Tutorial: Using styles

Styles a way of specifying how plots created by pyCreeper.crGraphs should look like. Styles are encapsulated in a pyCreeper.crGraphStyle.crGraphStyle object and the object’s properties may be set to change different settings.

There are several advantages of using pyCreeper’s crGraphStyle compared to the standard matplotlib way:

1. crGraphStyle disallows setting of properties that are invalid. This means that python will let you know when you try to set a style that does not exist.
2. When you set crGraphStyle properties, a type check is performed in the background. Python will let you know if you are trying to set a property value that does not make sense
3. Enumerations instead of strings are used where appropriate, for example, to set a grid style. This meas that you can easily select from a set of valid values.
4. You can easily revert to the default look by calling the style reset function

When no styles are specified, pyCreeper.crGraphs uses a default style. For example, a default line plot may look like this:

To change the way the plot looks, for example, to change the colours, markers, font sizes, etc., properties of a pyCreeper.crGraphStyle.crGraphStyle need to be set. There are two ways of doing this.

One way is to create a brand new pyCreeper.crGraphStyle.crGraphStyle object, set its properties and then assign it to pyCreeper.crGraphs:

from python.pyCreeper import crGraphStyle;

#-- create new style object
myStyle = crGraphStyle.crGraphStyle();
style.markers = ['o','o','s'];
style.colors = ['g','c','r'];
style.titleFontSize = 40;
style.numOfLegendColumns = 1;
style.gridType = crGraphStyle.GRID_TYPE.MAJOR_HORIZONTAL;

#-- assign it to crGraphs
crGraphs.setStyle(style);

Another way is to directly set properties of the pyCreeper.crGraphStyle.crGraphStyle instance that is already stored in pyCreeper.crGraphs:

crGraphs.getStyle().markers = ['o','o','s'];
crGraphs.getStyle().colors = ['g','c','r'];
crGraphs.getStyle().titleFontSize = 40;
crGraphs.getStyle().numOfLegendColumns = 1;
crGraphs.getStyle().crGraphStyle.GRID_TYPE.MAJOR_HORIZONTAL;

Whichever way you use, pyCreeper.crGraphs now contains the new style:

Have a look at the pyCreeper.crGraphStyle.crGraphStyle documentation to see what style properties you can set.

The style will be applied to all pyCreeper.crGraphs function calls in the same python document. To reset the styles back to defaults, use

myStyle = crGraphStyle.crGraphStyle();
crGraphs.setStyle(style);

or simply

crGraphs.getStyle().reset();