Request for new matplotlib drawing styles

[albi3ro]

This is an ongoing issue where we always welcome more contributions.

Introduction and Motivation

PennyLane currently has multiple in-built styles for use with our matplotlib circuit drawer:

• "default"
• "black_white"
• "black_white_dark"
• "sketch"
• "sketch_dark"
• "solarized_light"
• "solarized_dark"
• "default"

See the documentation for these styles on the qml.drawer page. These styles work by setting matplotlib's rcParams dictionary.

We welcome contributors to submit new styles.

Each style should update the plt.rcParams configuration to make clean and readable circuit diagram graphics. Creating a new style is more about visual design than any coding.

Code requirements

To add a new style:

• add a private function to pennylane/drawer/style.py
• Decorate this function with @_needs_mpl
• Add the name of the style and it's function to the _styles_map dictionary
• Add a test to tests/drawer/test_style.py
• Run doc/_static/style/style_examples.py to generate a png demonstrating the new style
• Update doc/code/qml_drawer.rst so that it also displays the new style in the "Currently Available Styles" section. Note that displaying images side-by-side with rst can be tricky.

[trentfridey]

Hello - I have a PR with a couple new styles added, but I am running into a couple errors when completing the PR checklist:

• when running make docs to verify the documentation has been updated, I get

  no theme named 'xanadu' found (missing theme.conf?)

• when running make test, I get:

  ERROR: usage: __main__.py [options] [file_or_dir] [file_or_dir] [...]
  __main__.py: error: unrecognized arguments: --no-flaky-report

Can you advise on what I need to do to fix these errors?

[josh146]

Hey @trentfridey! It sounds like missing dependencies; can you see if

pip install xanadu-sphinx-theme flaky

fixes it?

[trentfridey]

Thanks, that seemed to fix it

[trentfridey]

The PR is ready for review now