Skip to content

DOC: Reintroduce glossary #30782

New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

Sign up for GitHub

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

Merged
timhoffm merged 3 commits into from
Nov 26, 2025
Merged

DOC: Reintroduce glossary #30782

Show file tree
Hide file tree
Changes from all commits
Commits
Show all changes
3 commits
Select commit Hold shift + click to select a range
10765e1
DOC: Reintroduce glossary
timhoffm Nov 24, 2025
be06f9b
Apply suggestions from code review
timhoffm Nov 24, 2025
188ab0b
Apply suggestions from code review
timhoffm Nov 26, 2025
File filter

Filter by extension

Filter by extension
Conversations
Failed to load comments.
Loading
Jump to
Jump to file
Failed to load files.
Loading
Diff view
Diff view
44 changes: 44 additions & 0 deletions doc/users/glossary.rst
View file
Open in desktop
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
@@ -0,0 +1,44 @@
========
Glossary
========

.. Note for glossary authors:
The glossary is primarily intended for Matplotlib's own concepts and
terminology, e.g. figure, artist, backend, etc. We don't want to list
general terms like "GUI framework", "event loop" or similar.
The glossary should contain a short definition of the term, aiming at
a high-level understanding. Use links to redirect to more comprehensive
explanations and API reference when possible.

This glossary defines concepts and terminology specific to Matplotlib.

.. glossary::

Figure
The outermost container for a Matplotlib graphic. Think of this as the
canvas to draw on.

This is implemented in the class `.Figure`. For more details see
:ref:`figure-intro`.

Axes
This is a container for what is often colloquially called a plot/chart/graph.
It's a data area with :term:`Axis`\ es, i.e. coordinate directions,
and includes data artists like lines, bars etc. as well as
decorations like title, axis labels, legend.

Since most "plotting operations" are realized as methods on `~.axes.Axes`
this is the object users will mostly interact with.

Note: The term *Axes* was taken over from MATLAB. Think of this as
a container spanned by the *x*- and *y*-axis, including decoration
and data.

Axis
A direction with a scale. The scale defines the mapping from
data coordinates to screen coordinates. The Axis also includes
the ticks and axis label.

Artist
The base class for all graphical element that can be drawn.
Examples are Lines, Rectangles, Text, Ticks, Legend, Axes, ...
1 change: 1 addition & 0 deletions doc/users/index.rst
View file
Open in desktop
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -103,3 +103,4 @@ Using Matplotlib

getting_started/index
../install/index
glossary