pylustrator: code generation for reproducible figures for publication

Abstract

One major challenge in science is to make all results potentially reproducible. Thus, along with the raw data, every step from basic processing of the data, evaluation, to the generation of the figures, has to be documented as clearly as possible. While there are many programming libraries that cover the basic processing and plotting steps (e.g. Matplotlib in Python), no library yet addresses the reproducible composing of single plots into meaningful figures for publication. Thus, up to now it is still state-of-the-art to generate publishable figures using image-processing or vector-drawing software leading to unwanted alterations of the presented data in the worst case and to figure quality reduction in the best case. Pylustrator a open source library based on the Matplotlib aims to fill this gap and provides a tool to easily generate the code necessary to compose publication figures from single plots. It provides a graphical user interface where the user can interactively compose the figures. All changes are tracked and converted to code that is automatically integrated into the calling script file. Thus, this software provides the missing link from raw data to the complete plot published in scientific journals and thus contributes to the transparency of the complete evaluation procedure.

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