Deprecations

matplotlib.use

The warn parameter to matplotlib.use() is deprecated (catch the ImportError emitted on backend switch failure and reemit a warning yourself if so desired).

plotfile

pyplot.plotfile is deprecated in favor of separately loading and plotting the data. See Plotting data from a file for various ways to use pandas or NumPy to load data, and pandas or matplotlib to plot the resulting data.

axes and axis

Setting Axis.major.locator, Axis.minor.locator, Axis.major.formatter or Axis.minor.formatter to an object that is not a subclass of Locator or Formatter (respectively) is deprecated. Note that these attributes should usually be set using Axis.set_major_locator, Axis.set_minor_locator, etc. which already raise an exception when an object of the wrong class is passed.

Passing more than one positional argument or unsupported keyword arguments to axis() is deprecated (such arguments used to be silently ignored).

minor argument will become keyword-only

Using the parameter minor to get_*ticks() / set_*ticks() as a positional parameter is deprecated. It will become keyword-only in future versions.

axes_grid1

The mpl_toolkits.axes_grid1.colorbar module and its colorbar implementation are deprecated in favor of matplotlib.colorbar, as the former is essentially abandoned and the latter is a more featureful replacement with a nearly compatible API (for example, the following additional keywords are supported: panchor, extendfrac, extendrect).

The main differences are:

• Setting the ticks on the colorbar is done by calling colorbar.set_ticks rather than colorbar.cbar_axis.set_xticks or colorbar.cbar_axis.set_yticks; the locator parameter to colorbar() is deprecated in favor of its synonym ticks (which already existed previously, and is consistent with matplotlib.colorbar).
• The colorbar's long axis is accessed with colorbar.xaxis or colorbar.yaxis depending on the orientation, rather than colorbar.cbar_axis.
• The default ticker is no longer MaxNLocator(5), but a _ColorbarAutoLocator.
• Overdrawing multiple colorbars on top of one another in a single Axes (e.g. when using the cax attribute of ImageGrid elements) is not supported; if you previously relied on the second colorbar being drawn over the first, you can call cax.cla() to clear the axes before drawing the second colorbar.

During the deprecation period, the mpl_toolkits.legacy_colorbar rcParam can be set to True to use mpl_toolkits.axes_grid1.colorbar in mpl_toolkits.axes_grid1 code with a deprecation warning (the default), or to False to use matplotlib.colorbar.

Passing a pad size of None (the default) as a synonym for zero to the append_axes, new_horizontal and new_vertical methods of axes_grid1.axes_divider.AxesDivider is deprecated. In a future release, the default value of None will mean "use rcParams["figure.subplot.wspace"] (default: 0.2) or rcParams["figure.subplot.hspace"] (default: 0.2)" (depending on the orientation). Explicitly pass pad=0 to keep the old behavior.

Axes3D

mplot3d.axis3d.get_flip_min_max is deprecated.

axes3d.unit_bbox is deprecated (use Bbox.unit instead).

axes3d.Axes3D.w_xaxis, .w_yaxis, and .w_zaxis are deprecated (use .xaxis, .yaxis, and .zaxis instead).

matplotlib.cm

cm.revcmap is deprecated. Use Colormap.reversed to reverse a colormap.

cm.datad no longer contains entries for reversed colormaps in their "unconverted" form.

axisartist

mpl_toolkits.axisartist.grid_finder.GridFinderBase is deprecated (its only use is to be inherited by the GridFinder class which just provides more defaults in the constructor and directly sets the transforms, so GridFinderBase's methods were just moved to GridFinder).

axisartist.axis_artist.BezierPath is deprecated (use patches.PathPatch to draw arbitrary Paths).

AxisArtist.line is now a patches.PathPatch instance instead of a BezierPath instance.

Returning a factor equal to None from axisartist Locators (which are not the same as "standard" tick Locators), or passing a factor equal to None to axisartist Formatters (which are not the same as "standard" tick Formatters) is deprecated. Pass a factor equal to 1 instead.

For the mpl_toolkits.axisartist.axis_artist.AttributeCopier class, the constructor and the set_ref_artist method, and the default_value parameter of get_attribute_from_ref_artist, are deprecated.

Deprecation of the constructor means that classes inheriting from AttributeCopier should no longer call its constructor.

Locators

The unused Locator.autoscale() method is deprecated (pass the axis limits to Locator.view_limits() instead).

Animation

The following methods and attributes of the MovieWriterRegistry class are deprecated: set_dirty, ensure_not_dirty, reset_available_writers, avail.

smart_bounds()

The "smart_bounds" functionality is deprecated. This includes Axis.set_smart_bounds(), Axis.get_smart_bounds(), Spine.set_smart_bounds(), and Spine.get_smart_bounds().

boxplot()

Setting the whis parameter of Axes.boxplot and cbook.boxplot_stats to "range" to mean "the whole data range" is deprecated; set it to (0, 100) (which gets interpreted as percentiles) to achieve the same effect.

fill_between()

Passing scalars to parameter where in fill_between() and fill_betweenx() is deprecated. While the documentation already states that where must be of the same size as x (or y), scalars were accepted and broadcasted to the size of x. Non-matching sizes will raise a ValueError in the future.

tight_layout()

The renderer parameter to Figure.tight_layout is deprecated; this method now always uses the renderer instance cached on the Figure.

rcParams

The rcsetup.validate_animation_writer_path function is deprecated.

Setting rcParams["savefig.format"] (default: 'png') to "auto" is deprecated; use its synonym "png" instead.

Setting rcParams["text.hinting"] (default: 'auto') to True or False is deprecated; use their synonyms "auto" or "none" instead.

rcsetup.update_savefig_format is deprecated.

rcsetup.validate_path_exists is deprecated (use os.path.exists to check whether a path exists).

rcsetup.ValidateInterval is deprecated.

Dates

dates.mx2num is deprecated.

TK

NavigationToolbar2Tk.set_active is deprecated, as it has no (observable) effect.

WX

FigureFrameWx.statusbar and NavigationToolbar2Wx.statbar are deprecated. The status bar can be retrieved by calling standard wx methods (frame.GetStatusBar() and toolbar.GetTopLevelParent().GetStatusBar()).

backend_wx.ConfigureSubplotsWx.configure_subplots and backend_wx.ConfigureSubplotsWx.get_canvas are deprecated.

PGF

backend_pgf.repl_escapetext and backend_pgf.repl_mathdefault are deprecated.

RendererPgf.latexManager is deprecated.

FigureCanvas

FigureCanvasBase.draw_cursor (which has never done anything and has never been overridden in any backend) is deprecated.

FigureCanvasMac.invalidate is deprecated in favor of its synonym, FigureCanvasMac.draw_idle.

The dryrun parameter to the various FigureCanvasFoo.print_foo methods is deprecated.

QuiverKey doc

quiver.QuiverKey.quiverkey_doc is deprecated; use quiver.QuiverKey.__init__.__doc__ instead.

matplotlib.mlab

mlab.apply_window and mlab.stride_repeat are deprecated.

Fonts

font_manager.JSONEncoder is deprecated. Use font_manager.json_dump to dump a FontManager instance.

font_manager.createFontList is deprecated. font_manager.FontManager.addfont is now available to register a font at a given path.

The as_str, as_rgba_str, as_array, get_width and get_height methods of matplotlib.ft2font.FT2Image are deprecated. Convert the FT2Image to a NumPy array with np.asarray before processing it.

Colors

The function matplotlib.colors.makeMappingArray is not considered part of the public API any longer. Thus, it's deprecated.

Using a string of single-character colors as a color sequence (e.g. "rgb") is deprecated. Use an explicit list instead.

Scales

Passing unsupported keyword arguments to ScaleBase, and its subclasses LinearScale and SymmetricalLogScale, is deprecated and will raise a TypeError in 3.3.

If extra keyword arguments are passed to LogScale, TypeError will now be raised instead of ValueError.

Testing

The matplotlib.testing.disable_internet module is deprecated. Use (for example) pytest-remotedata instead.

Support in matplotlib.testing for nose-based tests is deprecated (a deprecation is emitted if using e.g. the decorators from that module while both 1) matplotlib's conftests have not been called and 2) nose is in sys.modules).

testing.is_called_from_pytest is deprecated.

During the deprecation period, to force the generation of nose base tests, import nose first.

The switch_backend_warn parameter to matplotlib.test has no effect and is deprecated.

testing.jpl_units.UnitDbl.UnitDbl.checkUnits is deprecated.

DivergingNorm renamed to TwoSlopeNorm

DivergingNorm was a misleading name; although the norm was developed with the idea that it would likely be used with diverging colormaps, the word 'diverging' does not describe or evoke the norm's mapping function. Since that function is monotonic, continuous, and piece-wise linear with two segments, the norm has been renamed to TwoSlopeNorm

Misc

matplotlib.get_home is deprecated (use e.g. os.path.expanduser("~")) instead.

matplotlib.compare_versions is deprecated (use comparison of distutils.version.LooseVersions instead).

matplotlib.checkdep_ps_distiller is deprecated.

matplotlib.figure.AxesStack is considered private API and will be removed from the public API in future versions.

BboxBase.is_unit is deprecated (check the Bbox extents if needed).

Affine2DBase.matrix_from_values(...) is deprecated. Use (for example) Affine2D.from_values(...).get_matrix() instead.

style.core.is_style_file and style.core.iter_style_files are deprecated.

The datapath rcParam

Use get_data_path instead. (The rcParam is deprecated because it cannot be meaningfully set by an end user.) The rcParam had no effect from 3.2.0, but was deprecated only in 3.2.1. In 3.2.1+ if 'datapath' is set in a matplotlibrc file it will be respected, but this behavior will be removed in 3.3.