Hi, I am preparing plots for submission to a professional scientific journal (specifically, The Astrophysical Journal). Are there any Julia packages designed to make the plots look appropriate for the style of a journal like this? (I could try hunting & seeking over all of the plot options, but I wonder if someone has put together a package like this; my plots look vaguely amateurish so far.)
In the past, I have always exported my data and used an external plotting program (like OriginPro) to do the plots; but that would take a very large amount of needless work in this case. I would rather have an in-Julia option, since I’ve done my calculations in Julia.
(And yes, I will include a citation to Julia in the paper.)
Thank you!
Are you writing your paper in LaTeX? I use PythonPlot.jl, which lets you use LaTeX in plot text, such as axis labels. Which is nice, because you can then use the same fonts in the plots and the main text. And LLMs work very well; they can help you to create and format the plots.
But there are many other options. The key point is to use vector graphics, so save your plots as PDF before including them in your paper.
I tell my students to use GitHub - aenarete/ControlPlots.jl: Easy to use plotting for control engineers and students because it is easy for beginners. The README might give you some inspiration.
But there are many other options. CairoMakie | Makie probably also works well.
Shameless advertising: My last paper with many nice plots.
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GMT (reproducible here via GMT.jl) has over 14 k citations in scientific journals.
I looked at the first five papers in the current. number and for the most part the plots are not highly finished. The Makie ecosystem should be able to produce any of them without too much trouble. If you can provide some fake (or real) data and an example of the output you are aiming for, I can show you how that can be done.