Covers publication-ready matplotlib figures for academic papers, slides, and reports—bars, trends, scatter, heatmaps, and multi-panel layouts—with this repository’s house style, print/vector export conventions, and parity with figures4papers demos. Use when the user is finalizing or creating such figures in matplotlib. Do not use for interactive dashboards or web viz (Plotly, Altair, Bokeh), exploratory-only plots without a publication target, dominant 3D or geographic mapping, or Illustrator/Figma-first infographic workflows.