.. _sphx_glr_gallery_api_histogram_path.py: ======================================================== Building histograms using Rectangles and PolyCollections ======================================================== Using a path patch to draw rectangles. The technique of using lots of Rectangle instances, or the faster method of using PolyCollections, were implemented before we had proper paths with moveto/lineto, closepoly etc in mpl. Now that we have them, we can draw collections of regularly shaped objects with homogeneous properties more efficiently with a PathCollection. This example makes a histogram -- its more work to set up the vertex arrays at the outset, but it should be much faster for large numbers of objects .. image:: /gallery/api/images/sphx_glr_histogram_path_001.png :align: center .. code-block:: python import numpy as np import matplotlib.pyplot as plt import matplotlib.patches as patches import matplotlib.path as path fig, ax = plt.subplots() # Fixing random state for reproducibility np.random.seed(19680801) # histogram our data with numpy data = np.random.randn(1000) n, bins = np.histogram(data, 50) # get the corners of the rectangles for the histogram left = np.array(bins[:-1]) right = np.array(bins[1:]) bottom = np.zeros(len(left)) top = bottom + n # we need a (numrects x numsides x 2) numpy array for the path helper # function to build a compound path XY = np.array([[left, left, right, right], [bottom, top, top, bottom]]).T # get the Path object barpath = path.Path.make_compound_path_from_polys(XY) # make a patch out of it patch = patches.PathPatch(barpath) ax.add_patch(patch) # update the view limits ax.set_xlim(left[0], right[-1]) ax.set_ylim(bottom.min(), top.max()) plt.show() **Total running time of the script:** ( 0 minutes 0.018 seconds) .. only :: html .. container:: sphx-glr-footer .. container:: sphx-glr-download :download:`Download Python source code: histogram_path.py ` .. container:: sphx-glr-download :download:`Download Jupyter notebook: histogram_path.ipynb ` .. only:: html .. rst-class:: sphx-glr-signature `Gallery generated by Sphinx-Gallery `_