matplotlibrc rcParams modified for Jupyter inline plots

Question

I have seen this question come up a couple of times, but I think this information changes as jupyter/ipython get updated. I am currently running python 3.5, jupyter (latest

Answer 1

Some of the rcParameters are set specifically for the inline backend. Those are

{'figure.figsize': (6.0,4.0),  
 'figure.facecolor': (1,1,1,0), # play nicely with white background in the Qt and notebook
 'figure.edgecolor': (1,1,1,0),      
 'font.size': 10, # 12pt labels get cutoff on 6x4 logplots, so use 10pt.
 'figure.dpi': 72, # 72 dpi matches SVG/qtconsole
 'figure.subplot.bottom' : .125 # 10pt still needs a little more room on the xlabel
  }

And the place where they reside is the ipykernel/pylab/config.py file. This file can be edited to obtain the desired behaviour, e.g. by changing the facecolor to 'figure.facecolor': (1,1,1,1) (no transparency).

Another option is the following:

The rcParameters are defined as part of the InlineBackend class, specifically the InlineBackend.rc attribute which is a traitlets.Dict object.

Those can be changed using the ipython configuration system as follows.

From the command line type ipython profile create which will generate the default configuration files in ~/.ipython. In the main configuration file ~/.ipython/ipython_config.py include the line:

c.InlineBackend.rc.update({"figure.facecolor": "white"})