I am writing a quick-and-dirty script to generate plots on the fly. I am using the code below (from Matplotlib documentation) as a starting point:
from pylab import figure, axes, pie, title, show
# Make a square figure and axes
figure(1, figsize=(6, 6))
ax = axes([0.1, 0.1, 0.8, 0.8])
labels = 'Frogs', 'Hogs', 'Dogs', 'Logs'
fracs = [15, 30, 45, 10]
explode = (0, 0.05, 0, 0)
pie(fracs, explode=explode, labels=labels, autopct='%1.1f%%', shadow=True)
title('Raining Hogs and Dogs', bbox={'facecolor': '0.8', 'pad': 5})
show() # Actually, don't show, just save to foo.png
I don't want to display the plot on a GUI, instead, I want to save the plot to a file (say foo.png), so that, for example, it can be used in batch scripts. How do I do that?
Best Answer
While the question has been answered, I'd like to add some useful tips when using
matplotlib.pyplot.savefig
. The file format can be specified by the extension:Will give a rasterized or vectorized output respectively, both which could be useful. In addition, there's often an undesirable, whitespace around the image, which can be removed with:
Note that if showing the plot,
plt.show()
should followplt.savefig()
, otherwise the file image will be blank.