Customize Rc

I'm not trying to make a good looking figure here, but just to show some examples of customizing rc params on the fly

If you like to work interactively, and need to create different sets of defaults for figures (e.g., one set of defaults for publication, one set for interactive exploration), you may want to define some functions in a custom module that set the defaults, e.g.,:

def set_pub():
    rc('font', weight='bold')    # bold fonts are easier to see
    rc('tick', labelsize=15)     # tick labels bigger
    rc('lines', lw=1, color='k') # thicker black lines
    rc('grid', c='0.5', ls='-', lw=0.5)  # solid gray grid lines
    rc('savefig', dpi=300)       # higher res outputs

Then as you are working interactively, you just need to do:

>>> set_pub()
>>> subplot(111)
>>> plot([1,2,3])
>>> savefig('myfig')
>>> rcdefaults()  # restore the defaults

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

plt.subplot(311)
plt.plot([1, 2, 3])

# the axes attributes need to be set before the call to subplot
plt.rc('font', weight='bold')
plt.rc('xtick.major', size=5, pad=7)
plt.rc('xtick', labelsize=15)

# using aliases for color, linestyle and linewidth; gray, solid, thick
plt.rc('grid', c='0.5', ls='-', lw=5)
plt.rc('lines', lw=2, color='g')
plt.subplot(312)

plt.plot([1, 2, 3])
plt.grid(True)

plt.rcdefaults()
plt.subplot(313)
plt.plot([1, 2, 3])
plt.grid(True)
plt.show()