Tools for Quick and Attractive Plotting with ROOT

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ROOT is a powerful data analysis tool within the particle physics community, and the primary lens through which we see our data. The rootplot package exploits the pyROOT interface to provide scripts and libraries to make working with the graphical side of ROOT easier.

For immediate figures with a minimum of effort from any ROOT file filled with histograms, take a look at the rootplot command-line tool.

To get a quick glimpse at the contents of a ROOT file from the command-line, try rootinfo.

To quickly produce histograms from a ROOT tree or ntuple, take a look at the tree2hists command-line tool.

To plot ROOT figures with the powerful matplotlib python plotting package, take a look at the root2matplotlib library and rootplotmpl.

Future

Many of the under-the-hood features of the rootplot libraries have also been implemented independently and more robustly in rootpy. rootplot is no longer being actively developed and can be considered effectively deprecated in favor of rootpy. Please take a look at that project and consider contributing your own improvements.

Contact

rootplot was created by Jeff Klukas and Michael Anderson. Both of us have left academia, so we won't be continuing to work on the rootplot project, but you can find us at jeff.klukas.net and mbanderson at uwalmni dot com, respectively.

Installation

The easiest installation of rootplot is through easyinstall:

$ easy_install rootplot

The installer will place the whole rootplot package in an appropriate place in your python tree. It will also install the rootplot, rootplotmpl, rootinfo, and tree2hists scripts in an appropriate bin directory so that they are available on the command line.

The current user base is mostly members of the CMS experiment at CERN, who should know that as of CMSSW_3_8_7, rootplot is included in our software framework. When you run cmsenv, all the command-line tools will be available, and in modern versions (at least as of CMSSW_4_2_8) matplotlib is included, so rootplotmpl is also enabled. If you’d like to use the rootplot API within CMSSW, be aware that it is contained within a subpackage, so import statments should look like:

import PhysicsTools.PythonAnalysis.rootplot

This implementation within a subpackage, however, is flawed and some internal imports won’t work. You will be safer if you explicitly include the subpackage in your python path (after which you will be able to import rootplot as normal):

## example for bash
export PYTHONPATH="$CMSSW_RELEASE_BASE/python/PhysicsTools/PythonAnalysis/:$PYTHONPATH

For other users at CERN, you can access an existing installation on lxplus:

$ source /afs/cern.ch/user/k/klukas/public/Sharing/rootplot_setup.sh

This will point to a local installation of rootplot and should also set up a compatible cocktail of python, matplotlib, and ROOT. After you run the script, you can check that it works by trying out some of the root2matplotlib examples.

Interfacing with matplotlib

The root2matplotlib library requires that you have both pyROOT and matplotlib available within a single python installation. This may be easy on Linux platforms (see the PyROOT site), but it is more difficult on a Mac. For additional help, see instructions for a Mac OSX 10.6 installation.

Installing from the Repository

rootplot is version controlled with Mercurial. To download the latest development version:

$ hg clone http://bitbucket.org/klukas/rootplot
$ cd rootplot
$ python setup.py develop

And to update:

$ hg pull http://bitbucket.org/klukas/rootplot
$ hg update