Plotting with Matplotlib

The default plotting extension for HoloViews until a 2.0 release is Matplotlib when HoloViews will start defaulting to Bokeh (see the Plotting with Bokeh user guide).

While the 'bokeh' backend provides many useful interactive features, the 'matplotlib' plotting extension is well suited to static exports for printed figures and because matplotlib is very full featured allows. To enable the 'matplotlib' backend, we can initialize the Holoviews notebook extension:

import numpy as np
import holoviews as hv
from holoviews import opts

hv.extension('matplotlib')