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. Before plotting, follow the Notebook call below and invoke apply_figure_style().

Open-Science Notebook call

Every notebook_execute request whose code uses a function named in this skill includes this skill ID:

{ "kernelSkillIds": ["figure-style"], "code": "apply_figure_style()\n..." }

kernelSkillIds contains the skill ID; function calls belong in code. This request is complete as written: call the named functions directly and do not add an import or discovery step.

§0 Scope

Load trigger (same rule as the system prompt's "Publication-grade plots" section): this skill is for final-deliverable figures, those shipping in a report, paper, or export, or saved as an artifact the user will keep, not for exploratory/intermediate plots (quick looks, EDA, sanity checks), which are drawn plainly without it. Once loaded, "every plot" below means every plot you render toward the deliverable.

§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 centering, §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.