Figures and backends

When looking at Matplotlib visualization, you are almost always looking at Artists placed on a ~.Figure. In the example below, the figure is the blue region and ~.Figure.add_subplot has added an ~.axes.Axes artist to the ~.Figure (see :ref:`figure_parts`). A more complicated visualization can add multiple Axes to the Figure, colorbars, legends, annotations, and the Axes themselves can have multiple Artists added to them (e.g. ax.plot or ax.imshow).

.. plot::
    :include-source:

    fig = plt.figure(figsize=(4, 2), facecolor='lightskyblue',
                     layout='constrained')
    fig.suptitle('A nice Matplotlib Figure')
    ax = fig.add_subplot()
    ax.set_title('Axes', loc='left', fontstyle='oblique', fontsize='medium')

.. toctree::
    :maxdepth: 2

    Introduction to figures <figure_intro>

.. toctree::
    :maxdepth: 1

    Output backends <backends>
    Matplotlib Application Interfaces (APIs) <api_interfaces>
    Interacting with figures <interactive>
    Interactive figures and asynchronous programming <interactive_guide>
    Event handling <event_handling>
    Writing a backend -- the pyplot interface <writing_a_backend_pyplot_interface>