cms_figure

The CMS Publication Committee has a set of guidelines regarding how figures should appear in more official settings. To that end, they provide a ROOT C++ macro for drawing figure labels that is accompanied by an all too literal translation into Python. Both versions suffer from vague parameter names, unintuitive values for arguments, and lack of documentation.

Having worked on restyling figures for publication, I decided to craft a more user-friendly experience for myself and others. The end result is this unofficial cms_figure package that features:

• The TDRStyle context manager that helps with switching to and from the official plotting style.
• The draw_labels utility function that positions and draws figure labels on the active canvas.
• The CMSLabel and LuminosityLabel classes for power users that need customization beyond typical use-cases covered by draw_labels.
• And docstrings. Docstrings everywhere!