figure-style

Publication-Grade Figure Rules

A checklist for correct, legible, internally-consistent scientific figures. This skill does not impose a visual house style — frame, font, and palette are parameters. Load it and call apply_figure_style() before any plot.

§0 Scope

§1–§3, §8, and §9 are correctness — they apply to every plot, in every context, and have no aesthetic content. §4–§7 are guidance — defaults that produce a clean result but that a deliberate alternative can override (individual rules inside §4–§7 that state a factual/perceptual invariant — e.g. §4.4 semantic-zero centring, §4.5 CVD, §6.9 leader anchoring — still bind). On its own, this skill is the inner tier (make one plot good); figure-composer and paper-narrative supply multi-panel and whole-paper context.

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§1 Data fidelity & self-consistency

1.1 Excluded rows. A row marked excluded or flagged in the source data is either omitted entirely or drawn with a visually distinct open/hatched marker and named in the key. It never enters a summary statistic plotted alongside the included rows.

1.2 Comparable conditions only. Arms measured under non-comparable conditions (different N, epoch budget, initialisation, protocol) are not plotted as visual peers. Separate them with a facet break or a marker on the label, and state the difference once in the caption.

1.3 Self-consistency. Every key, threshold, and title inside the figure must be satisfied by every plotted row. Before saving, walk each categorical outcome label back to the rule that defines it; if a row's value contradicts its label or the title, the figure is wrong, not the data.

1.4 Claim-titles must be true. A sentence-title (§5.1) is tested against every category on the axis before rendering. If any contradicts it, qualify the title ("on 3 of 4 pairs") or downgrade it to a description.

1.5 State n and what was held fixed. Every panel that draws a summary mark states n and the unit of replication, and every small-multiple that holds a variable fixed states the fixed value — in the panel or, when §2 budget is tight, in the caption.