Cookbook
Want to try these live? Open the Playground — pick an example, change the theme, resize the chart, and see the SVG update instantly in your browser. No install needed.
Code examples with rendered output. Every example uses the fluent Plt.Create() API and can be copy-pasted into a .NET 10 console app with dotnet add package MatPlotLibNet (and MatPlotLibNet.Skia for PNG/PDF/GIF).
Categories
| Category | Examples |
|---|---|
| Line Charts | Line styles, markers, smooth interpolation, step functions, PropCycler, LTTB downsampling, grid/spine control, secondary Y-axis, outside legend |
| Bar Charts | Vertical/horizontal bars, stacked, grouped, bar labels, hatching, width/alpha control |
| Pie & Donut | Pie, donut, nested pie (sunburst), explode, shadow, percentage labels, custom colors, hatches |
| Distribution | Histogram (density, cumulative, step, hatched, overlapping), box plot, violin, KDE, rug plot |
| Polar Charts | Polar line, multi-series, radar, polar bar, polar scatter, polar heatmap |
| Heatmaps & Colormaps | Heatmap, colorbar customization, 104 colormaps, color normalization, 2D histogram, pcolormesh |
| Contour Plots | Contour lines with labels, filled contour, custom levels, contour overlay, triangulated contour |
| Subplots & GridSpec | Grid subplots, GridSpec ratios, mosaic layout, spanning subplots, insets, shared axes, spacing |
| Financial Charts | Candlestick + MACD + RSI dashboard, technical indicators (Bollinger, Williams %R, OBV, SAR, CCI) |
| Sankey Diagrams | Income statement, customer journey, process distribution, vertical orientation, severity cascade |
| Treemaps & Hierarchical | Nested pie, treemap with drilldown |
| 3D Charts | Surface, scatter, bar, Line3D, Trisurf, Contour3D, Quiver3D, Voxels, Text3D, camera, lighting, pane styling |
| Math Text | Greek letters, fractions, square roots, accents, font variants, operator limits (∫ Σ Π), matrices |
| Error Bars | Symmetric, asymmetric, cap size, combined scatter+error, confidence bands |
| Broken Axes | X/Y breaks, zigzag/diagonal/none styles, combined breaks, outlier handling |
| Symlog Axis | Symmetric log Y/X, financial P&L, scale comparison (linear vs log vs symlog) |
| Geographic Maps | 13 projections, globe view, coastlines, borders, land/ocean fill, custom GeoJSON, edge handling |
| Themes | 26 built-in themes, custom ThemeBuilder, PropCycler, 3D pane colors |
| Interactive SVG | Browser pan/zoom/tooltips/legend toggle, highlight, selection, 3D rotation, SignalR |
| Animation | FuncAnimation GIF, multi-page PDF, individual frame export, rotating 3D |
| Streaming & Realtime | Live data append, ring buffers, streaming indicators, axis scaling, Rx integration |
| Annotations | Text, arrows, reference lines (horizontal/vertical), shaded spans, math text in annotations |
| Styling & Themes | 26 themes, PropCycler, grid/spine control, tight margins, tick mirroring, templates |
| Tick Formatting | Engineering notation, date axes, custom locators, minor ticks |
| Accessibility | Color-blind safe palette, high-contrast theme, ARIA semantics, keyboard navigation |