There are several GUI libraries available, and one widely used library is Qt. In this book, we will be using Qt 5, the latest major version of this library. Unless explicitly mentioned, we are referring to Qt 5 when we simply state Qt throughout the chapter.

We will follow a similar progression to that in Chapter 5, Embedding Matplotlib in GTK+3, and we will present similar examples but this time written in Qt.

We believe that this method will allow us to directly compare the libraries, and it has the advantage of not leaving the How would I write something with library X? question unanswered.

In this chapter, we will learn how to:

• Embed a Matplotlib figure into a Qt widget
• Embed a figure and navigation toolbar into a Qt widget
• Use events to update a Matplotlib plot in real time
• Use QT Designer to draw a GUI and then use it with Matplotlib in a simple Python application

We will begin by giving an introduction to the library.