My 2cents: To me this looks a bit cluttered.

Semi-OT: The overview page https://matplotlib.org/stable/plot_types/index is great. However, I don't see much benefit in the individual plot type pages like https://matplotlib.org/stable/plot_types/basic/plot.html.

They contain

• a link to the method
• The plot again, which is already on the overview page.
• quite a bit boilerplate code to generate the plot. this is mostly data and song-and-dance to make the plot more pictographic (square, hide axes labels etc.) It's not representative code example how you would typically use the function.

In sum, IMHO, there is no relevant content apart from the link.

From a UX perspective, I would find it more straight forward to link from the overview page directly to the methods. This of course would mean, Sphinx gallery is not the right tool anymore. Instead, one would likely have to pre-render the plots and lay them out e.g. with Sphinx-design. The mini-galleries are useful, but I think they belong to the method (=all related content in one place).

Note: One could put the creation of all the plots in a single example "Plot icons" (under examples), which would

• explain how one creates this type plots
• serves as the generation code for the pre-rendered plots mentioned above.

I think the pages would flow better as graphic then code & I like the idea of one very stripped down example that shows just plotting one data set and very simple labeling. Mostly cause many of our examples have the opposite problem - doing too many things so it's hard to parse out the one thing.

In sum, IMHO, there is no relevant content apart from the link.

Yeah, that's why I was thinking of adding the min-galleries, so they can act as a kind of TOC into the examples - but we can also achieve this with tags.

From a UX perspective, I would find it more straight forward to link from the overview page directly to the methods

It's probably too hard to do & may not make any sense, but I kinda wish we could put each method on its own page. Both because some of the methods (like hist) have so much information, and because mini-galleries at the bottom of each of those pages would make sense. Also would not be opposed to (and I think this we can do) the gallery page having the pretty thumbnails, but the individual pages having the most basic w/ all the Matplotlib defaults, no special labeling, form.

Instead, one would likely have to pre-render the plots

I think we can maybe do this using the plot directive + just use the sphinx gallery thumbnail directive + thumbnail parent div directive ....

I also think this suggestion is too cluttered - "see bar" leads to the same gallery of related examples, so this would be redundant.

I like the small example for each page. It's helpful in its own right, and links the method both explicitly, and in the code if people need the in-depth documentation.

If we want the best of both worlds, maybe a link to https://matplotlib.org/stable/api/_as_gen/matplotlib.axes.Axes.bar.html#examples-using-matplotlib-axes-axes-bar would be a reasonable thing to add next to the API link? (eg. More examples <../..//api/_as_gen/matplotlib.axes.Axes.bar.html#examples-using-matplotlib-axes-axes-bar>_)

If we want the best of both worlds, maybe a link to https://matplotlib.org/stable/api/_as_gen/matplotlib.axes.Axes.bar.html#examples-using-matplotlib-axes-axes-bar would be a reasonable thing to add next to the API link? (eg. More examples <../..//api/as_gen/matplotlib.axes.Axes.bar.html#examples-using-matplotlib-axes-axes-bar>)

Tagging this ..plot_type:bar will achieve the same end - all that's waiting on is melissawm/sphinx-tags#84 getting merged & a new release of sphinx-tags, but I can start batching the tagging PRs assuming that PR goes in.