Thanks! I always save the illustrator file as an editable pdf, that way it is self contained even when the panels are technically links.

Thanks! Yes, that's a good way of doing it if you don't like Illustrator, I just find it way too time consuming to position everything programmatically (and I have free Adobe through my uni 😁)

I didn't know that, that's cool!

I hope you found this useful! Here is a Google Colab with example code of what was discussed in this thread:

colab.research.google.com/drive/1UlCET...

The workflow: Python plots single panels, saved as pdfs. Create an empty figure of 7 inch (180 mm) wide in Illustrator and place the panels as links. Add the panel letters (a,b,c). Now, if a new version of a panel is generated you just have to click update links in Illustrator and it's there. 🤩

A note about colors 🌈 Imagine you made eight figures and your PI asks you to change the color of an element you've consistently plotted green into orange. If you define your colors in the plotting function you only have to change it there and rerun the plotting scripts, this save a lot of time!

Full width figures typically have four panels next to each other, a good rule of thumb is that a single panel is 1.75 by 1.75 inch. Create two figure panels like this:

f, axs = plt.subplots(1, 2, figsize=(1.75 * 2, 1.75), dpi=300)

⚠️ If it's too small increase the dpi, not the figsize!

The font size of each plot element can be easily set with seaborn. Write a function like this that sets the font size and any other style element you like to have in all your plots and the function each time before plotting (link to the code in the last post).

Journals have criteria figures have to adhere to. Generally, a full-width figure should be 7 inch wide and font sizes cannot be smaller than 7 pts. If you get into the habit of always creating figures that fit these criteria this will save you a lot of time when submitting.

Getting a hundred bucks would have been nice! We had to pay them twelve thousand bucks instead.

Of course, that makes complete sense 🙃