'axes''xtick''ytick''grid''legendor many others after that can follow sequence of keyword arguments indicating the new parameters an easy way to write down the options in your program is as dictfont_options {'family'monospace''weight'bold''size'small'plt rc('font'**font_optionsfor more extensive customization and to see list of all the optionsmatplotlib comes with configuration file matplotlibrc in the matplotlib/mpl-data directory if you customize this file and place it in your home directory titled matplotlibrcit will be loaded each time you use matplotlib plotting functions in pandas as you've seenmatplotlib is actually fairly low-level tool you assemble plot from its base componentsthe data display (the type of plotlinebarboxscattercontouretc )legendtitletick labelsand other annotations part of the reason for this is that in many cases the data needed to make complete plot is spread across many objects in pandas we have row labelscolumn labelsand possibly grouping information this means that many kinds of fully-formed plots that would ordinarily require lot of matplotlib code can be expressed in one or two concise statements thereforepandas has an increasing number of high-level plotting methods for creating standard visualizations that take advantage of how data is organized in dataframe objects as of this writingthe plotting functionality in pandas is undergoing quite bit of work as part of the google summer of code programa student is working full time to add features and to make the interface more consistent and usable thusit' possible that this code may fall out-of-date faster than the other things in this book the online pandas documentation will be the best resource in that event line plots series and dataframe each have plot method for making many different plot types by defaultthey make line plots (see figure - )in [ ] series(np random randn( cumsum()index=np arange( )in [ ] plot(the series object' index is passed to matplotlib for plotting on the axisthough this can be disabled by passing use_index=false the axis ticks and limits can be adjusted using the xticks and xlim optionsand axis respectively using yticks and ylim see plotting and visualization www it-ebooks info