Plot Styling

Choose the right Python plotting library for the chart type, then apply journal-quality defaults so the panel that comes out of savefig is ready for the [[scientific-figure]] composer — no manual cleanup, no font-size firefighting, no chart junk.

Two questions, two minutes

1. What chart type am I drawing? That answer picks the library (references/library-decision-tree.md).
2. Which journal am I targeting? That answer picks the style sheet and font minimum (references/sciplots-recipes.md).

Run those choices through the export conventions below and the output SVG should pass figure-qa's plot-script branch and feed scientific-figure without scale-down surprises.

Library decision tree (summary)