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darkdragon-001 opened this issue Dec 12, 2016 · 2 comments · Fixed by #15111
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Figure background colors #7619

darkdragon-001 opened this issue Dec 12, 2016 · 2 comments · Fixed by #15111
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v3.3.0

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@darkdragon-001
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darkdragon-001 commented Dec 12, 2016 •
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I find the current handling of background colors very non-intuitive:

  1. figure facecolor is not applied for savefig() by default
  2. figure facecolor is not applied setting frameon=False
  3. axis_bgcolor is not applied when hiding axis lines/ticks via axis('off')

So using a white plain surface to draw objects needs the following code:

fig = figure(..., facecolor='w', edgecolor='None')
ax.axis('equal')        # equal scale
ax.axis('off')          # do not show axis
ax.axis([-1, 1, -1, 1]) # scale to unit lengths
show()
fig.savefig(..., facecolor=fig.get_facecolor(), edgecolor='None', transparent=True)

My suggestion

  • apply same colors to savefig() by default
  • mention in the docs of axis_bgcolor and axis('off') that this setting is ignored
  • mention in the docs of facecolor and frameon that this setting is ignored
@tacaswell
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We are always happy to get PRs to clarify documentation!

If you do not pass a facecolor it defaults to the value of rcParams['savefig.facecolor'] which should have defaulted to white.

It is less 'is not applied' than the background patches are simply not drawn if you ask them to not be drawn.

@anntzer anntzer mentioned this issue Jan 3, 2019
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@Spenhouet
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Spenhouet commented May 25, 2019 •
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Wow thanks for this thread. I was just about to write a bug report since my figures were always saved with a black facecolor instead of the correct white one (that is also rendered correct in IPython).

Just adding facecolor=fig.get_facecolor() to the save parameters solved this.
I agree that this is unintuitive.

@anntzer anntzer mentioned this issue Aug 23, 2019
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@nschloe nschloe mentioned this issue May 4, 2020
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@QuLogic QuLogic added this to the v3.3.0 milestone May 4, 2020
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By default, don't change the figure face/edgecolor on savefig(). anntzer/matplotlib
4 participants
@darkdragon-001 @tacaswell @QuLogic @Spenhouet