matplotlib-devel Mailing List for matplotlib

On Saturday 03 September 2005 8:47 pm, Eric Firing wrote:
> John,
>
> In the course of looking at the colorbar patch, I came up with two small
> changes for you to consider:
>
> 1) I added an rc option "tick.direction" which can be "in" (default) or
> "out". With "in", there is no change from present behavior. With
> "out", all ticks are outside the box, and tick labels are shifted
> accordingly. I think outward ticks are particularly appropriate for
> things like filled contours and colorbars; inward ticks tend to be
> obscured.
Thank you for doing this, I had been making the same changes to my colorbars.
Darren

John,
In the course of looking at the colorbar patch, I came up with two small 
changes for you to consider:
1) I added an rc option "tick.direction" which can be "in" (default) or 
"out". With "in", there is no change from present behavior. With 
"out", all ticks are outside the box, and tick labels are shifted 
accordingly. I think outward ticks are particularly appropriate for 
things like filled contours and colorbars; inward ticks tend to be obscured.
2) I shifted the axis drawing to a later stage, so that the axes are 
drawn on top, instead of getting overpainted by contourf.
There are also some cleanups:
1) "class ContourfMappable(ScalarMappable)" was not being used, so I 
deleted it.
2) I deleted a redundant initialization of self.images[] from axes.py.
3) Optionally, stripped out trailing blanks. I will provide two diffs, 
one that ignores blanks, and one that does not, but otherwise the same. 
 I will send you the diffs offline so as not to clutter the list.
Now, regarding the colorbar change committed by Jeff: at present it has 
the minor disadvantage of breaking contourf if the latter is called with 
explicit colors instead of with a colormap. I think I can fix this and 
improve readability by making some changes in contour.py and in the 
colorbar code. That's next.
Eric