[sciboy]

I have used R/ggplot for a long time now, and it's exceedingly difficult to produce beautiful visualizations.

The only thing that makes tufte-quality visualizations in my experience is hand-building your graphs in tikz.

The graphs you linked to are hideous from an aesthetics point of view; font's are ugly, data:ink ratio far too low, color choices poor etc.

[wwortiz]

Especially when you have such pretty defaults in things like Matlab and Mathematica.

Matplotlib (http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/) is actually the best opensource library for creating great looking graphs that I have come across, and is comparable to Matlab and Mathematica.

[sciboy]

I've looked at matplotlib but still think it's ugly by default.

Compare to:

http://www.texample.net/tikz/examples/weather-stations-data/

http://www.texample.net/tikz/examples/rna-codons-table/

The beauty of tex font's + vector graphics is impressive. Try zooming in on the sparklines in the first example

[cdavid]

I guess taste comes in place - I find producing good (as in academic publication good) figures in matlab an exercice of pain. The subplot mechanism is awful (at least was 5 years ago), and it is hard to control the layout. I heard mathematic is much better in that regard, but never used it myself.