Paper Ink Charts — Development skill for Claude Code

paper-ink-charts

**Scientific figures that look typeset, not generated.** Warm paper, one ink, one accent, no grid.

An Agent Skill + a small Python renderer for making paper figures — bar, line, scatter, box, heatmap, multi-panel — that read as part of a printed page instead of as default matplotlib output.







The idea

Default matplotlib makes figures that look like software output. A journal figure looks like a page. The gap is not skill, it is a hundred small decisions: which colors, how heavy the axis, whether to keep the grid, where the numbers go.

This repo fixes those decisions in one place and enforces them.

paper   #EFE6D5     warm ground, never pure white
ink     #1A1A1A     all text and primary data
graphite #5E584F    halftone, captions, comparison series
accent  #A33B2A     the one thing you want noticed
rule    #C4B9A6     hairlines, decorative only

Three rules do most of the work:

**No grid. No y-axis.** Every number is set directly on or above its mark. The axis line and its ticks exist only to translate height into numbers — labeling the value does that job with less ink.

**One accent per figure.** Emphasis is a scarce signal. Two accented things is the same as zero: the reader is told twice to look nowhere.

**Halftone stays behind the data.** The paper texture is the style's signature and it is still non-data ink. A dot may never overlap, tint, or occlude a mark. This is enforced mechanically, not by discipline — see below.

Use it

git clone https://github.com/gkw77/paper-ink-charts && cd paper-i