pylustrator: Code generation for reproducible figures for publication

TL;DR

Pylustrator is an open-source library that facilitates the reproducible creation of publication-quality figures by providing an interactive GUI that generates code for composing plots from raw data, enhancing transparency and reproducibility in scientific research.

Contribution

It introduces a novel tool that bridges the gap between raw data processing and publication-ready figures by combining interactive figure composition with automatic code generation.

Findings

Enables reproducible figure creation from raw data.

Integrates interactive GUI with code generation.

Improves transparency and quality of scientific figures.

Abstract

One major challenge in science is to make all results potentially reproducible. Thus, along with the raw data, every step from basic processing of the data, evaluation, to the generation of the figures, has to be documented as clearly as possible. While there are many programming libraries that cover the basic processing and plotting steps (e.g. Matplotlib in Python), no library yet addresses the reproducible composing of single plots into meaningful figures for publication. Thus, up to now it is still state-of-the-art to generate publishable figures using image-processing or vector-drawing software leading to unwanted alterations of the presented data in the worst case and to figure quality reduction in the best case. Pylustrator a open source library based on the Matplotlib aims to fill this gap and provides a tool to easily generate the code necessary to compose publication figures from single plots. It provides a graphical user interface where the user can interactively compose the figures. All changes are tracked and converted to code that is automatically integrated into the calling script file. Thus, this software provides the missing link from raw data to the complete plot published in scientific journals and thus contributes to the transparency of the complete evaluation procedure.