Matplotlib SVG Filter Line

Introduction

This lab demonstrates how to use SVG filtering effects with Matplotlib. The filtering effects are only effective if your SVG renderer supports it.

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Skills Graph

Import Required Libraries

First, we need to import the required libraries: matplotlib.pyplot, io and xml.etree.ElementTree.

import io
import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import matplotlib.transforms as mtransforms

Create a Figure and Axes

We create a figure object with plt.figure() and add an axes object using fig1.add_axes(). We also set the size and position of the axes using [0.1, 0.1, 0.8, 0.8].

fig1 = plt.figure()
ax = fig1.add_axes([0.1, 0.1, 0.8, 0.8])

Draw Lines

We draw two lines using ax.plot(). We also customize the lines with different colors, markers, and labels.

l1, = ax.plot([0.1, 0.5, 0.9], [0.1, 0.9, 0.5], "bo-", mec="b", lw=5, ms=10, label="Line 1")
l2, = ax.plot([0.1, 0.5, 0.9], [0.5, 0.2, 0.7], "rs-", mec="r", lw=5, ms=10, label="Line 2")

Draw Shadows

We draw shadows for the lines by using the same lines with a slight offset and gray colors. We adjust the color and zorder of the shadow lines so that they are drawn below the original lines. We also use the offset_copy() method to create an offset transform for the shadow lines.

for l in [l1, l2]:
    xx = l.get_xdata()
    yy = l.get_ydata()
    shadow, = ax.plot(xx, yy)
    shadow.update_from(l)

    shadow.set_color("0.2")
    shadow.set_zorder(l.get_zorder() - 0.5)

    transform = mtransforms.offset_copy(l.get_transform(), fig1, x=4.0, y=-6.0, units='points')
    shadow.set_transform(transform)

    shadow.set_gid(l.get_label() + "_shadow")

Set Axes Limits and Save Figure

We set the x and y limits for the axes and save the figure as a bytes string in the SVG format using io.BytesIO() and plt.savefig().

ax.set_xlim(0., 1.)
ax.set_ylim(0., 1.)

f = io.BytesIO()
plt.savefig(f, format="svg")

Define Filter

We define a filter for a Gaussian blur using the <defs> and <filter> tags with the stdDeviation attribute.

filter_def = """
  <defs xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2000/svg'
        xmlns:xlink='http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink'>
    <filter id='dropshadow' height='1.2' width='1.2'>
      <feGaussianBlur result='blur' stdDeviation='3'/>
    </filter>
  </defs>
"""

Read and Modify SVG

We read in the saved SVG using ET.XMLID() and insert the filter definition in the SVG DOM tree using tree.insert(). We then pick up the SVG element with the given ID and apply the shadow filter using shadow.set().

tree, xmlid = ET.XMLID(f.getvalue())

tree.insert(0, ET.XML(filter_def))

for l in [l1, l2]:
    shadow = xmlid[l.get_label() + "_shadow"]
    shadow.set("filter", 'url(#dropshadow)')

fn = "svg_filter_line.svg"
print(f"Saving '{fn}'")
ET.ElementTree(tree).write(fn)

Summary

This lab demonstrated how to use SVG filtering effects with Matplotlib. We learned how to create a figure and axes, draw lines and shadows, set axes limits, and define and apply filters to an SVG.