I also recommend separating repetitive parts of plot generating code into template files, such as with mako or jinja2, and then programmatically generate sequences of plots by first piping the data into the jinja2 template, and then using insert commands to insert it into a bigger tex document. I found this helpful when writing a paper where the appendix needed over 35 different tables of regression results, all with…
That's a great point! Templates are a great tool to generate big tables from results, I usually do that for most of the results in my papers, makes it easier to have the odd copy/paste error. I might add this to the tips and tricks, thanks!