supportY

SupportY is an open‑source software library that provides utilities for generating and manipulating the Y‑axis of scientific plots. The project was initiated in 2018 by the DataViz Research Group at the University of Wellington as a supplement to the widely used Matplotlib ecosystem. Written primarily in Python, SupportY supplies functions for automatically determining Y‑axis limits, custom tick schemes, and logarithmic and exponential scaling that adapt to non‑linear data distributions. The library also includes helpers for labeling, grid generation, and exporting y‑axis objects in formats compatible with LaTeX and plain text documents.

Key features of SupportY include a modular architecture that allows developers to plug in alternative statistical estimators for outlier‑robust tick selection, a command‑line interface for batch processing large datasets, and integration with popular data science stacks such as Pandas, NumPy, and SciPy. The package is distributed under the MIT license and is available via PyPI. It has been cited in several publications on data visualization methodology and has been adopted by academic institutions to teach best practices in plot design. SupportY continues to evolve with contributions from an active community of developers on GitHub, with releases that add support for novel chart types such as violin plots and heatmaps.