Functional interface¶

Flexitext provides the flexitext() function. With the exception of the formatted strings, it works in the same way than the .text() method on Matplotlib's Axes objects. You can see its full documentation here.

Setup¶

import matplotlib as mpl
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

from flexitext import flexitext

mpl.rcParams["figure.figsize"] = (6, 4)
mpl.rcParams["figure.dpi"] = 120

Formatted strings¶

Albeit being inspired on ggtext, Flexitext does not use HTML, CSS, or Markdown to specify text styles. On the contrary, it implements a tag-based styling that looks similar to HTML tags, but is not exactly like HTML. These formatted strings consist of three components:

An opening tag that defines the styles to apply.
The text to be styled.
A closing tag, indicating the extent to which the styles in the opening tag apply.

Let's see an example:

"<color:blue, size:16>This is blue text</> and this is regular text"

<color:blue, size:16> is the opening tag. Styles are key-value pairs separated by :. Multiple styles are separated by commas.
This is blue text is the text block. This text is going to be drawn using a font size of 16 and blue color.
</> is the closing tag. Only the text within the opening and the closing tags is formatted.

And finally we have and this is regular text. This is going to be drawn using the default style because it is not contained within any formatting tags.

fig, ax = plt.subplots()

text = "<color:blue, size:16>This is blue text</> and this is regular text"
flexitext(0.5, 0.5, text, ha="center");

png

Additionally, styles can be nested. If you define a styled block within the text component of an other styled block, the inner is formatted according to the combination of both styles. For example:

fig, ax = plt.subplots()

text = "<color:blue, size:16>Everything is blue, but <weight:bold>this is also bold</></>"
flexitext(0.5, 0.5, text, ha="center");

png

Notice the innermost style overrides settings from the outer one.

fig, ax = plt.subplots()

text = "<color:blue, weight:bold>Everything is bold, <color:red>but this is red</></>"
flexitext(0.5, 0.5, text, ha="center");

png

More examples¶

Flexitext supports a variety of styles. You can change color, transparency, font, style, weight, etc. The following examples showcase how to customize text in different ways using flexitext() and formatted strings.

fig, ax = plt.subplots()

flexitext(
    0.05, 0.9, 
    "<size:14, color:#ff5c67>Mix <weight:bold>bold</> and <weight:light>light</></>"
)

flexitext(
    0.05, 0.8, 
    "<size:12>Highlight <weight:bold, color:#64a5ff>information</></>"
)


text = (
    "<size:12, name:Lato>Use breaklines\n"
    "and make text\n<size:36>BIGGER</>\n"
    "<size:12>and also smaller</></>"
)

flexitext(
    0.5, 0.5, 
    text,
    ha="center",
    ma="center"
)

text = (
    "<size:18, name:Lobster Two>Align text as "
    "<color:#ffb382, weight:bold, name:Special Elite>usual</></>"
)

flexitext(
    1, 0, 
    text,
    ha="right",
    va="bottom"
);

png

fig, ax = plt.subplots()
fig.subplots_adjust(top=0.8)

flexitext(
    0, 1, "<size:22><color:red>Axes</> fraction</>", 
    va="top"
);

flexitext(
    0.9, 0.82, 
    "<size:22><color:red>Figure</> fraction</>", 
    va="bottom", ha="right", 
    xycoords="figure fraction"
)

flexitext(
    0.9, 0.02, 
    "Usefool for <style:italic, weight:bold>captions</>", 
    ha="right", 
    xycoords="figure fraction"
)

flexitext(
    0.5, 0.6, 
    "<size:22>Some <alpha:0.3>transparency</></>",
    ha="center"
)

flexitext(
    0.5, 0.4, 
    "<size:22>And <family:monospace, color:red>monospace</> too</>",
    ha="center"
)

text = "<size:14>break</>\n<size:12>break</>\n<size:10>break</>"

flexitext(0, 0, text, va="bottom");

flexitext(0.5, 0, text, ha="center", ma="center", va="bottom");

flexitext(1, 0, text, ha="right", ma="right", va="bottom");

png