On Fri, 26 Mar 2010, Florin Iucha wrote: > On Fri, Mar 26, 2010 at 01:18:48PM -0500, Mike Miller wrote: > >>> Matplotlib (a python library) by default produces better-looking >>> graphs than R. You can of course tweak both, but for quick graphs I >>> prefer the former. >> >> Very interesting. Are there good screenshots somewhere? > > http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/gallery.html > > vs. > > http://addictedtor.free.fr/graphiques/ That's great. Of course, in both matplotlib and R galleries we are seeing many graphs that are generated from a big bunch of code. As I am currently pretty dedicated to continuing in-depth R studies, I'll mostly stick to using R for graphs, but I agree that the matplotlib graphs look fantastic and I wouldn't encourage a Python user to learn R just for the graphs! >> Is it hard to learn to make graphs in Matplotlib starting from, say, a >> tab-delimited data file? > > Not at all: > > http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/examples/pylab_examples/scatter_demo.html That doesn't seem to import a data file, but I'll take your word for it. That code is very simple (in the good sense of the word). Mike