One of the things I repeat­edly include in ref­eree reports, and in my responses to authors who have sub­mit­ted papers to the Inter­na­tional Jour­nal of Fore­cast­ing, are com­ments designed to include the qual­ity of the graph­ics. Recently some­one asked on stats​.stack​ex​change​.com about best prac­tices for pro­duc­ing plots. So I thought it might be help­ful to col­late some of the answers given there and add a few com­ments of my own taken from things I’ve writ­ten for authors. The fol­low­ing “rules” are in no par­tic­u­lar order. Use vec­tor graph­ics such as eps or pdf. These scale prop­erly and do not look fuzzy when enlarged. Do not use jpeg, bmp or png files as these will look fuzzy when enlarged, or if saved at very high res­o­lu­tions will be enor­mous files. Jpegs in par­tic­u­lar are designed for phở­tographs not sta­tis­ti­cal graph­ics. Use read­able fonts. For graph­ics I pre­fer sans-​​​​serif fonts such as Hel­vetica or Arial. Make sure the font size is read­able after the fig­ure is scaled to what­ever size it will be printed. Avoid clut­tered leg­ends. Where pos­si­ble, add labels directly to the ele­ments of the plot rather than use a leg­end at all. If this won’t work, then keep the leg­end from obscur­ing the plot­ted data,

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