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Physics Plot Gallery

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General
Physics Plot Gallery (PPG) is a simple HTML5 javascript-application for running matplotlib scripts in the browser. The purpose of PPG is to provide a gallery where matplotlib scripts are stored that can be easily modified and shown in physics classes. Of course these scripts also run in any Python environment where matplotlib is installed. The complete gallery can be downloaded from GitHub as a zip-file.

Getting started

• Select a convenient graph from the gallery.
• Modify the Python script to your needs.
• Press Run to execute the script.
• Download the graph in pdf, png or svg format.
• Do not forget to save your script using

  Download script

  button.
• Next time you can upload your script directly.
• Do you have a nice matplotlib script? Send it to me.

Hash link
When you have your own matplotlib scripts on a webserver (e.g. on GitHub), you can open this script directly on PPG with a direct link using the hash function. This way you can easily share your script with others. The direct link would be for instance:

   https://jeroenvantilburg.nl/ppg/#https://www.example.com/test.py

Keep in mind that you teh webserver has to set

Access-Control-Allow-Origin

due to the CORS-policy on most browsers. You can also host your python scripts on your own Github Pages when you have a Github account. This way you will bypass any CORS restriction. The direct link would then be:

   https://jeroenvantilburg.nl/ppg/#https://myname.github.io/myproject/test.py

Technology
The Python script is interpreted by the Pyodide engine. Pyodide is a Python distribution for the browser which is built using the WebAssembly/Emscripten compiler. This means that the full Python interpreter runs directly (locally) in the browser.
The main drawback of running Python through the browser is the lack of a generic graphical backend. This means that any graphical output has to be fetched from the Pyodide side and placed on the website when the Python script has finished. For this reason PPG puts some minimal requirements on the Python scripts. Namely that each script has to start with

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

and end with

plt.show()

.

Security/privacy
No data leaves your computer by using this website. All analysis is done locally on your own computer. This is a cookie-free website.

Webapp compatibility
PPG does not run yet on all mobile devices. PPG does not work in Internet Explorer. In case you are still using IE, please consider moving to a modern browser like Chrome, Edge, Firefox or Safari.

Source code
The source code from this website is freely available on GitHub under the free Unlicense. The source code may be freely copied and hosted on every web server. Please make sure to keep the code up-to-date since new updates and bug fixes may come out.

Feedback and questions
To keep this website as user-friendly as possible I depend on your feedback. Please send your questions, improvements, bug reports, suggestions, comments and compliments to .

Acknowledgments
Many thanks to GitHub and GitHub Pages for hosting PPG. PPG depends on the following useful javascript libraries:

• Pyodide: Python interpreter in the browser
• CodeMirror: Python syntax highlighting
• jQuery: DOM manipulation

Other applications
Besides PPG, there are a number of other, third-party applications that can be used to run Matplotlib scripts. Select the application that suits your needs.

• Iodide is a notebook-like environment for literate scientific computing and communication for the web. It is no longer actively maintained. Historically, Pyodide started as plugin for iodide.
• JupyterLite is a JupyterLab distribution that runs entirely in the browser, based on Pyodide.