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Make background transparent by default when saving figure #2384
Description
When saving a matplotlib figure as PNG or SVG, the background is always saved as white canvas. This is somewhat confusing since the background color of a figure as displayed by matplotlib's interactive backend is gray.
Also, the white background makes the figure look foreign when embedded in something that does not have a white background.
I would suggest to change the default either to save the background
- in the color that is actually displayed, or
- as transparent.
Note that the letter is possible by explicitly setting
fig = pp.figure()
fig.patch.set_alpha(0.0)
Activity
dmcdougall commentedon Sep 7, 2013
By this, do you mean an interactive backend?
nschloe commentedon Sep 7, 2013
Exactly. I adapted the original post.
tacaswell commentedon Sep 7, 2013
I think this overlaps with Issue #2388
dmcdougall commentedon Sep 7, 2013
I'm not in favour of changing default behaviour, especially in this case. If a transparent background is made the default, figures will look different in different viewers. However, it looks like @tacaswell has put together a patch to allow one to change the default behaviour by setting a parameter in matplotlib's configuration file. I'd be happy with that. I'm going to head over there and give his patch a review.
Thanks for the input @nschloe.
dmcdougall commentedon Sep 8, 2013
Workaround implemented in #2390.
nschloe commentedon Sep 10, 2013
I would argue that the idea of having a figure blending in with the background in which it is embedded (e.g., a color gradient in a presentation) outweighs a consistent background of the figure when embedded in multiple documents, so I'd still vote for a transparent default.
Anyways, thanks for the quick reaction here!
tacaswell commentedon Sep 10, 2013
I would argue that a color gradient in a presentation is exactly the time you want to have a uniform solid background (so you can actually read the plot). Changing defaults at all is bad (because you break working code and is as such a non-backwards compatible API change) and I find this one a particularly bad idea.
You can now make your code behave this way just by adding
rcParaml['savefig.transparent'] = Trueto the top of your programs or editing yourmatplotlibrcfile.