Making Plots and Diagrams for Presentations, Papers, and Theses

Presentation on making plots and diagrams for presentations, papers, and theses. The primary audience, at the present time, is undergraduate and graduate students in STEM fields. The source for the presentation, its diagrams, and the Jupyter/IPython notebook to make the plots are at the provided GitHub link and are licensed CC BY 4.0. The current version of the presentation is named current.pdf. The other versions are stored by as version_X.pdf where X is the version. Note that this figshare replaces http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1590009 which had file naming issues. The abstract is below Plots and diagrams are a common visual means of conveying information in scientific talks, papers, and theses. A good plot or diagram conveys the desired information clearly and in a way that gives understanding that would be lacking in a table or description giving the same information by itself. In addition, the plot or diagram should be understandable to people with various types of colorblindness and when printed on a printer (color or greyscale) or shown on a projector. A bad plot or diagram can serve as a distraction and cause confusion, or be otherwise difficult to read. This presentation will show how to make plots and diagrams more clear and readable. In addition, computer and printing considerations will be discussed. These include screens and projectors, printers, fonts, etc.<br>