FAQ¶

My figure looks different from the gallery — why?¶

The gallery images were generated with LaTeX rendering enabled. If latex is not installed on your machine, PeerStyle automatically falls back to STIX fonts, which are visually close but not identical. You will see a warning in the console:

Warning: LaTeX not found. Falling back to STIX fonts.

To get consistent output without installing LaTeX, explicitly add the no-latex modifier:

peerstyle.use_style(['ieee', 'no-latex'])

How do I reset to default Matplotlib settings?¶

import matplotlib as mpl
mpl.rcdefaults()

Or use style_context so you never have to reset manually:

with peerstyle.style_context('nature'):
    fig, ax = plt.subplots()
    ...
# defaults restored automatically

My labels or tick marks are cut off when saving¶

This usually means bbox_inches was not set. Use peerstyle.save which sets bbox_inches='tight' by default:

peerstyle.save(fig, 'figure.pdf')

If you use fig.savefig directly, add the argument yourself:

fig.savefig('figure.pdf', bbox_inches='tight', pad_inches=0.05)

Can I create my own custom style?¶

Yes. A .mplstyle file is plain text. Create one with only the settings you want to override:

# my_style.mplstyle
axes.prop_cycle: cycler('color', ['003f5c', '58508d', 'bc5090', 'ff6361', 'ffa600'])
lines.linewidth: 1.5
axes.linewidth: 0.8

Then load it by path:

peerstyle.use_style('/path/to/my_style.mplstyle')

# or stack it with a preset
peerstyle.use_style(['ieee', '/path/to/my_style.mplstyle'])

How do I use PeerStyle inside a function or class?¶

Use style_context so the style does not affect code outside the function:

def make_figure(data):
    with peerstyle.style_context('nature'):
        fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=peerstyle.figsize('nature'))
        ax.plot(data)
        return fig

Does PeerStyle work with Seaborn or Pandas?¶

Yes. Both render on Matplotlib axes, so use_style / style_context affect them as normal. For Seaborn, apply the style before calling Seaborn's theming functions — Seaborn's set_theme() will override rcParams set after it.

peerstyle.use_style('nature')       # apply first
ax = sns.lineplot(x=x, y=y)        # then plot

The `figsize` function doesn't have my journal's column width¶

Use the aspect parameter with a manual width instead:

# ACS single column is 3.25 in
w = 3.25
fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(w, w * 0.75))

Or open a GitHub issue to request a new preset.

How do I make a style permanent (across sessions)?¶

Copy the .mplstyle file from the package:

import shutil
import peerstyle

src = peerstyle.get_style_path('nature')
dst = Path.home() / '.config' / 'matplotlib' / 'stylelib' / 'nature.mplstyle'
dst.parent.mkdir(parents=True, exist_ok=True)
shutil.copy(src, dst)

Then in any script, without importing peerstyle:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
plt.style.use('nature')