general-figure-guide

npx skills add BioTender-max/awesome-bio-agent-skills --skill general-figure-guide --agent claude-code

Same command for any agent — swap --agent for codex, cursor, copilot.

# General Scientific Figure Quality Guide ## Overview This guide provides a universal quality checklist for evaluating scientific figures, whether generated programmatically (matplotlib, seaborn, R/ggplot2) or assembled manually. It focuses on visual readability issues that are common across all journals and easily missed during automated plot generation. ## Key Concepts ### Visual Readability A figure must communicate its data without requiring the reader to guess. The most common readability failures are overlapping labels, clipped text that runs outside the figure boundary, missing or unlabeled axes, absent legends, empty plot areas from incorrect data filtering, and overcrowded data points that merge into an unreadable mass. ### Resolution and Output Format Scientific figures generally require 300+ DPI for raster output (TIFF, PNG, JPEG) and vector formats (PDF, EPS, SVG) for line art and graphs. Vector formats are preferred for plots because they scale without quality loss. Raster formats are appropriate for photographs and micrographs. ### Color Accessibility Approximately 8% of males have some form of color vision deficiency. Figures that rely solely on red-green color diffe