Plotly Basics: Offline Plotting, Traces, Layout, and Customization in Jupyter Notebook

Plotly is a powerful open‑source data‑visualisation framework that creates interactive web‑based charts, and this article explains its basic usage within Jupyter Notebook using the offline mode.

It first distinguishes online and offline plotting, recommending plotly.offline.plot() and plotly.offline.iplot() for offline work, and lists the main parameters of iplot() such as figure_or_data , show_link , link_text , image , filename , image_height , and image_width .

Simple examples show how to initialise the notebook mode, generate synthetic data with NumPy, create a basic scatter trace with go.Scatter , and render it using iplot . A second example demonstrates combining multiple traces (markers, lines+markers, lines) into a single figure.

The article then introduces the go.Layout object for customizing global font, title, axis properties, legend appearance, grid lines, and other layout options. Several code snippets illustrate setting axis titles and fonts, adjusting axis lines and grids, and repositioning the legend.

Additional layout parameters such as figure size, margins, background colours, hover behaviour, and subplot grids are described, with a brief overview of their dictionary‑style keys.

Finally, the article summarises the Plotly fundamentals covered and provides colour‑reference tables and a QR‑code link to further Python learning resources.