“matplotlib…looks bad” - this is true if using the default settings; however, it can be tweaked to give very nice output (although this is often very painful to do). Are you aware of Seaborn (https://seaborn.pydata.org)? This is a package built on top of matplotlib which gives nicer output by default.

Concerning a plotting package specifically for neuroscience (including simulation data), there is a plan to develop a companion to the Neo and Elephant packages, which would provide plotting tools both for raw data (e.g. Neo AnalogSignals, SpikeTrains) and for the results of data analysis produced by Elephant (heatmaps, spike histograms, cross-correlation plots, etc). Michael Denker could give you more information on the current planning, but in any case the idea is to have an open development process on Github so anyone can contribute. The NeuralEnsemble mailing list (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/neuralensemble) would be a good place to discuss this.

On 21 Jun 2019, at 01:17, TOM BUGNON <bugnon@wisc.edu> wrote:

Hi all,

I was wondering if the community had any suggestions of toolboxes to plot the output of simulations (ideally in python) and make publication-quality figures.
I am mostly thinking of eg spike rasterplots or heatmaps (time x variable) with large datasets. Ideally in such a way that those can be aligned with other figures easily (spike histograms, LFP, you name it)

This is a very general problem that I suppose a lot of us have been confronted with, and I actually haven't found so far a good solution:
-matplotlib (python) is robust and can handle large datasets but looks bad and is a nightmare to deal with when trying to make figures with multiple subplots of specific sizes etc
- altair (python) looked promising and versatile but is actually struggling with large datasets
- The existing projects for (analysis and) visualization of neural data that I have checked (elephant spykes etc) are either quite specific/limited or not very active. Additionally they are focused on real ePhys data: either multiunit spike data or single neuron continuous data, while simulations provide both.

Happy to get any suggestions and share some code !
Thanks, Tom
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