Frames, ticks, titles, and labels

Setting the style of the map frames, ticks, etc, is handled by the frame argument that all plotting methods of pygmt.Figure.

import pygmt

Plot frame

By default, PyGMT does not add a frame to your plot. For example, we can plot the coastlines of the world with a Mercator projection:

fig = pygmt.Figure()
fig.coast(shorelines="1/0.5p", region=[-180, 180, -60, 60], projection="M25c")
fig.show()

Out:

<IPython.core.display.Image object>

To add the default GMT frame to the plot, use frame="f" in pygmt.Figure.basemap or any other plotting module:

fig = pygmt.Figure()
fig.coast(shorelines="1/0.5p", region=[-180, 180, -60, 60], projection="M25c")
fig.basemap(frame="f")
fig.show()

Out:

<IPython.core.display.Image object>

Ticks and grid lines

The automatic frame (frame=True or frame="a") sets the default GMT style frame and automatically determines tick labels from the plot region.

fig = pygmt.Figure()
fig.coast(shorelines="1/0.5p", region=[-180, 180, -60, 60], projection="M25c")
fig.basemap(frame="a")
fig.show()

Out:

<IPython.core.display.Image object>

Add automatic grid lines to the plot by adding a g to frame:

fig = pygmt.Figure()
fig.coast(shorelines="1/0.5p", region=[-180, 180, -60, 60], projection="M25c")
fig.basemap(frame="ag")
fig.show()

Out:

<IPython.core.display.Image object>

Title

The figure title can be set by passing "+t<title>" to the frame parameter of pygmt.Figure.basemap. Passing multiple arguments to frame can be done by using a list, as show in the example below.

fig = pygmt.Figure()
fig.coast(shorelines="1/0.5p", region="IS", projection="M25c")
fig.basemap(frame=["a", "+tIceland"])
fig.show()

Out:

<IPython.core.display.Image object>

To use a title with multiple words, the title must be placed inside another set of quotation marks. To prevent the quotation marks from appearing in the figure title, the "\"" escape character notation can be used to cancel out the quotation marks.

fig = pygmt.Figure()
fig.coast(shorelines="1/0.5p", region="TT", projection="M25c")
fig.basemap(frame=["a", '+t"Trinidad and Tobago"'])
fig.show()

Out:

<IPython.core.display.Image object>