you may notice that the axis labels overlap matplotlib doesn' check whether the labels overlapso in case like this you would need to fix the labels yourself by specifying explicit tick locations and tick labels more on this in the coming sections colorsmarkersand line styles matplotlib' main plot function accepts arrays of and coordinates and optionally string abbreviation indicating color and line style for exampleto plot versus with green dashesyou would executeax plot(xy' --'this way of specifying both color and linestyle in string is provided as conveniencein practice if you were creating plots programmatically you might prefer not to have to munge strings together to create plots with the desired style the same plot could also have been expressed more explicitly asax plot(xylinestyle='--'color=' 'there are number of color abbreviations provided for commonly-used colorsbut any color on the spectrum can be used by specifying its rgb value (for example'#cece ce'you can see the full set of linestyles by looking at the docstring for plot line plots can additionally have markers to highlight the actual data points since matplotlib creates continuous line plotinterpolating between pointsit can occasionally be unclear where the points lie the marker can be part of the style stringwhich must have color followed by marker type and line style (see figure - )in [ ]plt plot(randn( cumsum()'ko--' plotting and visualization www it-ebooks info