I’m using the recently added PGF/Tikz support to save figures as .pgf commands to include in a Latex document (I love this new feature!).
The final rendered figures look great after running through pdflatex, but occasionally it’s impractical to use pure vector drawing instructions.
For example, I’m currently working on a figure with 6 subplots, each containing a scatter type plot with ~400k markers. The resulting .pgf file is ~350MB.
Is it possible to rasterize the individual axes plots (to .png say) and then generate a ‘hybrid’ .pgf output where things like axes ticks, labels, etc are still vectorized, but the excessively dense scatter plot are treated as imshow plots are and imported a raster images?
I’ve tried setting ‘rasterized’ = True on both the axes and the plot command, but no dice.
Sample code:
p = np.random.randn(400000,4) # of course I have actual data, but this should produce the same problem when saving
count = 0
for i in xrange(4):
for j in xrange(i+1,4):
count += 1
ax = fig.add_subplot(2,3, count, rasterized=True)
ax.plot(p[:,i], p[:,j], ‘k.’, markersize=0.25, rasterized=True)
Any advice or insight would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks