mpl.colors¶

A module for converting numbers or color arguments to RGB or RGBA

RGB and RGBA are sequences of, respectively, 3 or 4 floats in the range 0-1.

This module includes functions and classes for color specification conversions, and for mapping numbers to colors in a 1-D array of colors called a colormap. Colormapping typically involves two steps: a data array is first mapped onto the range 0-1 using an instance of Normalize or of a subclass; then this number in the 0-1 range is mapped to a color using an instance of a subclass of Colormap. Two are provided here: LinearSegmentedColormap, which is used to generate all the built-in colormap instances, but is also useful for making custom colormaps, and ListedColormap, which is used for generating a custom colormap from a list of color specifications.

The module also provides a single instance, colorConverter, of the ColorConverter class providing methods for converting single color specifications or sequences of them to RGB or RGBA.

Commands which take color arguments can use several formats to specify the colors. For the basic built-in colors, you can use a single letter

• b: blue
• g: green
• r: red
• c: cyan
• m: magenta
• y: yellow
• k: black
• w: white

Gray shades can be given as a string encoding a float in the 0-1 range, e.g.:

color = '0.75'

For a greater range of colors, you have two options. You can specify the color using an html hex string, as in:

color = '#eeefff'

or you can pass an R , G , B tuple, where each of R , G , B are in the range [0,1].

Finally, legal html names for colors, like ‘red’, ‘burlywood’ and ‘chartreuse’ are supported.