Don’t get me wrong either – I personally prefer Gnuplot by quite a margin, Matplotlib is indeed too verbose. These days I use Matplotlib more mainly because I u

Don’t get me wrong either – I personally prefer Gnuplot by quite a margin, Matplotlib is indeed too verbose. These days I use Matplotlib more mainly because I use Python more. I’m just saying that it doesn’t take too much configuration to make publication-quality plots in Matplotlib either, by e.g. enabling the TeX integration and setting up a reusable stylesheet file. The style sheet format is actually very reasonable, and several examples ship with Matplotlib. There’s also the Seaborn package if you want some nicer default stylesheets. (Side note, the same goes for Gnuplot… As shown by e.g. gnuplotting.org you can definitely create publication-quality plots there as well.)