Example

To use mpl2tex you need to know the pager width and font size of your TeX document. If you don’t know them add \showthe\columnwidth to your TeX code. When running pdflatex it will stop and show you the columnwidth of your document. For a \documentclass[a4paper]{article} document it will be 345 pt and the font size will be 10 pt by default. To plot the sin and cos function write:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np
from mpl2tex import RcParams

RcParams(bw=True)  # set the figure parameter

x = np.linspace(0, 2*np.pi, 100)
sin = np.sin(x)
cos = np.cos(x)

plt.plot(x, sin, label=r'sin($x$)')
plt.plot(x, cos, label=r'cos($x$)')
plt.xlabel(r'$x$')
plt.ylabel(r'$f(x)$')
plt.legend(loc=1)
plt.tight_layout()
plt.show()

(Source code, png, hires.png, pdf)

To include the figure in your TeX document save it as pgf and write in your TeX code:

\begin{figure}
  \centering
  \input{<filename>.pgf}
  \caption{Sinus and cosinus function generated with Matplotlib and mpl2tex}
\end{figure}

Make sure to load the required pgf package in your preamble. If you save the figure not in your document’s root directory you can use the import package:

\begin{figure}
  \centering
  \import{<path to file>}{<filename>.pgf}
  \caption{Sinus and cosinus function generated with Matplotlib and mpl2tex}
\end{figure}