[Importing Kiva] To import kiva, you need to get the constants (which includes pen styles, cap styles, lines styles, etc.), the font stuff, and a backend. You can import these all together with a wildcard: from kiva import * If you prefer to get the constants by themselves, you can also do a: import kiva and this will allow you to refer to them as kiva.JOIN_MITER, kiva.CAP_ROUND, etc. If you don't wish to do a wildcard import, you can also just grab the following by themselves: from kiva import Font, CompiledPath, GraphicsContext, Canvas, CanvasWindow This will auto-detect what backend is appropriate based on the OS platform, available libraries, and the order of backends listed in the KIVA_WISHLIST environment variable. If this environment variable is not defined, then the default ordering of backends is in __init__.py. If you want to choose what backend gets used, you can do the following: from kiva.backend_ import GraphicsContext, Canvas, CanvasWindow is one of: image - in-memory GraphicsContext, uses Agg to raster, can save out to any PIL format wx - uses Agg to raster to a platform-dependent wx window wx_gl - uses Agg to raster into a platform-dependent wx.glcanvas gl - uses OpenGL module to draw into a GL window mac - calls Quartz drawing routines into an OS X window/GraphicsContext ps - PostScript file output svg - SVG file output pdf - PDF file output (uses ReportLab)