Pylab documentation

Question

I visited the scipy site for PyLab. I could not find its documentation there. The matplotlib site also does not provide any information on it.

Where can I find a tutorial/documentation on PyLab?

Answer 1

Pylab is basically just Numpy and Matplotlib under a unified namespace. Learn about either of those and you will understand Pylab.

If you want to plot things in scripts it is generally preferred that you use import matplotlib.pyplot instead of import pylab, but really the choice is up to you.

If you want to have interactive plotting (for instance, by calling ipython --pylab) then pylab is the way to go. However pyplot can also be put in an interactive mode using pyplot.ion().

Some more information can be found here:

What is the difference between pylab and pyplot?

Exact semantics of Matplotlib's "interactive mode" (ion(), ioff())?