In almost all places in matplotlib where a color can be specified by the user it can be provided as:
[0, 1]
(e.g., (0.1, 0.2, 0.5)
or (0.1, 0.2, 0.5, 0.3)
)'#0F0F0F'
or '#0F0F0F0F'
)[0, 1]
inclusive for gray level (e.g., '0.5'
){'b', 'g', 'r', 'c', 'm', 'y', 'k', 'w'}
'xkcd:'
(e.g., 'xkcd:sky blue'
){'C0', 'C1', 'C2', 'C3', 'C4', 'C5', 'C6', 'C7', 'C8', 'C9'}
All string specifications of color are case-insensitive.
'CN'
color selection¶Color can be specified by a string matching the regex C[0-9]
.
This can be passed any place that a color is currently accepted and
can be used as a ‘single character color’ in format-string to
matplotlib.Axes.plot
.
The single digit is the index into the default property cycle
(matplotlib.rcParams['axes.prop_cycle']
). If the property cycle does not
include 'color'
then black is returned. The color is evaluated when the
artist is created. For example,
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import matplotlib as mpl
th = np.linspace(0, 2*np.pi, 128)
def demo(sty):
mpl.style.use(sty)
fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(3, 3))
ax.set_title('style: {!r}'.format(sty), color='C0')
ax.plot(th, np.cos(th), 'C1', label='C1')
ax.plot(th, np.sin(th), 'C2', label='C2')
ax.legend()
demo('default')
demo('seaborn')
will use the first color for the title and then plot using the second
and third colors of each style’s mpl.rcParams['axes.prop_cycle']
.
The xkcd colors are derived from a user survey conducted by the webcomic xkcd. Details of the survey are available on the xkcd blog.
Out of 148 colors in the CSS color list, there are 95 name collisions
between the X11/CSS4 names and the xkcd names, all but 3 of which have
different hex values. For example 'blue'
maps to '#0000FF'
where as 'xkcd:blue'
maps to '#0343DF'
. Due to these name
collisions all of the xkcd colors have 'xkcd:'
prefixed. As noted in
the blog post, while it might be interesting to re-define the X11/CSS4 names
based on such a survey, we do not do so unilaterally.
The name collisions are shown in the table below; the color names where the hex values agree are shown in bold.
(Source code, png, pdf)