Output formats and backends

Given its scientific roots (that means several different needs), Matplotlib has a lot of output formats available, which can be used for articles/books and other print publications, for web pages, or for any other reason we can think of. Let's first differentiate the output formats into two distinct categories:

Of course, Matplotlib supports both the categories, particularly with the following output formats:

PS or EPS formats are particularly useful for plots inclusion in LaTeX documents, the main scientific articles format since decades.

In the previous section, we saw the file output formats — they are also called hardcopy backends as they create something (a file on disk).

A backend that displays the image on screen is called a user interface backend.

The backend is that part of Matplotlib that works behind the scenes and allows the software to target several different output formats and GUI libraries (for screen visualization).

In order to be even more flexible, Matplotlib introduces the following two layers structured (only for GUI output):

The standard renderer is the Anti-Grain Geometry ( AGG) library, a high performance rendering engine which is able to create images of publication level quality, with anti-aliasing, and subpixel accuracy. AGG is responsible for the beautiful appearance of Matplotlib graphs.

The canvas is provided with the GUI libraries, and any of them can use the AGG rendering, along with the support for other rendering engines (for example, GTK+).

Let's have a look at the user interface toolkits and their available renderers:

Here is the list of renderers for file output:

The renderers mentioned in the previous table can be used directly in Matplotlib, when we want only to save the resulting graph into a file (without any visualization of it), in any of the formats supported.

We have to pay attention when choosing which backend to use. For example, if we don't have a graphical environment available, then we have to use the AGG backend (or any other file). If we have installed only the GTK+ Python bindings, then we can't use the WX backend.