Matplotlib and seaborn are my Go-to
this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2025
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Matplotlib is still a pain in the ass when you need to customize something seaborn can't handle
Matplotlib + export to SVG + final adjustments in Inkscape is my pick.
Valid. I remember being very frustrated with ggplot's documentation, only to realize they HARD CODED a plot parameter that could not be accessed. Matplotlib + Seaborn works fantastic, and I can do whatever I want without being babied by ggplot
Hot tip - export a basic plot to svg and format it in Inkscape. OBVIOUSLY DO NOT CHANGE ANYTHING THAT MODIFIES THE DATA OR RESULTS but it’s much easier to get a consistent look and feel in Inkscape than ggplot
Hotter tip - just make it all in inkscape, no one fact-checks anyway!
There's inkscape plugin to make barplots and piecharts. Why don't we add for more? Honestly we could even make it just take r code or python code.
both foss software, right?
I rather use the r-base plot functions for everything in R. It is more flexible especially when you need to tweak the visuals.
It can also be EXTREMELY long code to do something relatively simple. I bounce between base and ggplot, and use ggh4x for some oddly difficult stuff in ggplot.
graphpad is my #1
R with the tidyverse package is amazing once you get over the learning curve. It's so much easier to simply type a few lines of code then to fiddle with the Excel GUI, plus the ability to customize the plot is much, much better in R.
Yes making a simple plot in Excel is relatively easy, but try making something evening remotely complex and it's terrible. A box plot is a great example of this, 2 lines of plotting code in R for a basic plot but an absolute nightmare to create in Excel.
Afaik, you can't even make a box plot on excel without 3rd party plugins. You can maybe hack together one with a bar chart, and hiding/narrowing parts of it so that it sort of resembles a box plot if you never ever open the data.
Why not just cut to the chase and do it in Libre Office Calc?
Oh this touches close to him. I got into pgfplots since it would generate plots in latex at compile time and keep fonts consistent, etc. plots looked amazing though.
The worst was when a colleague couldn’t get a pdf to upload into a google doc, so he just made an ugly ass bar chart in excel for the final draft since that was easier. The only reason he could do that so quickly was because he could read the data so easily from the plot I made. Ugh. Still burns
I like Makie #JuliaGang
There are dozens of us #JuliaGang
Why not just use gnuplot?
I only know of gnuplot, how does ggplot differs from gnuplot?
I got my ggplot2 book signed by Hadley at rstudioconf a few years back :)
Make people accountable for spreading lies and missinformation. Its that simple. The more reach they have, the higher the punishment for spreading miss information.
And in order to make it easy for everyone, if you can proof that you did a research before publishing said missinformation it can lower the punishment. Again, more influence, more research necessary.
If we could start using block chains for information spreading, we could follow the sources of said information and everything would be tranparent.
Facet grid is a godsend, haven't seen anything like it in Excel. However, I will admit ggplot syntax and functionality is cryptic af, so I ask chatgpt for help and it's surprisingly accurate on this topic
Ggplot syntax (and tidyverse syntax in general) is incredibly clear when you compare it to the alternatives. Just try to use plotly to do anything simple and it'll take 6x the time.
Probably because there were so many questions about it on the forums
Back in my day, I used C to output plots in PostScript directly.
I've never seen a 'publication quality' plot that fits into the document as well as a tikz/pgf plot