matplotlib-devel Mailing List for matplotlib

On Thu, 5 May 2005, John Hunter wrote:
> OK, could you resend a patch against CVS?
> 
It is attached. There are two comments-questions in the patch,
please delete them after reading.
And at the end of this patched legend() method there is a line
handles = flatten(handles)
If handles are not already flat, I think something may go wrong
earlier in this method (?).
> Marcin> BTW when I was reading mpl docs I stopped for a while on
> Marcin> description of 'hold'. I'm not used to Matlab and didn't
> Marcin> understand what is "hold state". (I found it out in
> Marcin> Matlab docs).
> 
> When hold is True, subsequent plot commands will be added to the
> current axes. When hold is False, the current axes and figure
> will be cleared on the next plot command
Thanks for explaination. I guessed it works like this after finding
what 'hold' is in Matlab. I just meant to say that such explaination
could be helpful in mpl documentation.
> Marcin> 2. something like wxPython demo,
> Marcin> that contains all the examples
> 
> 2) Have you seen the examples directory in the matplotlib src
> distribution, and is also available here
> http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/matplotlib_examples_0.80.zip ?
> Or do you mean something else?
Yes, I've seen all the examples and they are very useful. However wxPython
demo is more useful than just a set of examples: examples are grouped
in categories, every example has a detailed documentation about 
introduced features. From wx demo overview:
"""
This demo is not only a collection of test cases for wxPython, but is also 
designed to help you learn about and how to use wxPython. Each sample is 
listed in the tree control on the left. When a sample is selected in the 
tree then a module is loaded and run (usually in a tab of this notebook,) 
and the source code of the module is loaded in another tab for you to 
browse and learn from. 
"""
Marcin
-- 
Marcin Wojdyr | http://www.unipress.waw.pl/~wojdyr/ 

John Hunter wrote:
>As mentioned, selecting charmap 0 is suppose to select a unicode
>character map, and apparently charmap 2 is such a map. So you have
>\alpha in a bunch of different styles (plain, bold, italic, etc -- how
>to deal with all of this choice in the context of TeX/mathtext fonts
>like rm, it, tt etc is where some of the artistry referred to above
>comes in). 
> 
>
I would think the font_manager should be able to help you here, at least 
for the 'rm' and'it' styles. The font_manager tries to provide such 
information with the .style attribute. The 'tt' style is the big 
problem, since this requires a fixed width font. TTF fonts don't provide 
this information. It must be known beforehand or somehow deduced by 
reading the widths of the characters, if one is to do this in the 
general sense. The other option is to hardcode it into MPL. You 
probably know this already, but thought I should mention it anyway.
 -- Paul
-- 
Paul Barrett, PhD Space Telescope Science Institute
Phone: 410-338-4475 ESS/Science Software Branch
FAX: 410-338-4767 Baltimore, MD 21218

John Hunter wrote:
> So some creative ways to handles these cases will have to be devised;
> a good start would be to google search
> 
> tex unicode
Also
 tex mathml
since the MathML people have to deal with the same problem.
> and do a little reading to get the lay of the land. There have been
> previous efforts at mapping characters between TeX and unicode, and
> I've worked on this before (see below). Also, search the archives for
> any posts by Robert Kern on the issue of mathtext --- they are all
> filled with sage advice and wonderful links that you will never find
> even if you google for 1000 years. Unfortunately, the sourceforge
> search engine is as sucky as their stats engine, so finding these
> posts may be difficult.
But Gmane is pretty good.
http://search.gmane.org/search.php?query=tex&email=kern&group=gmane.comp.python.matplotlib.general&sort=date
And couple useful tidbits that I sent privately:
"""There's some information here to go from various TeX font encodings 
to Unicode:
http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/xdvi/xdvik/texk/xdvik/encodings.c?rev=1.13.2.14&view=markup
They claim some parts of it are GPLed from the catdvi project. I'm not 
sure if one can copyright this kind of information; how much creative 
choice is involved? But it might be worth asking the relevant 
individuals for permission.
"""
"""If you want to use the algorithms from _TeX: The Program_, I would 
suggest that you take a look at the publications of Luca Padovani, the 
implementor of GtkMathView. He describes how he uses, more or less, the 
TeX algorithms without the extra information provided by fonts designed 
for use in TeX.
MathML formatting with TeX rules, TeX fonts, and TeX quality
http://www.tug.org/TUGboat/Articles/tb24-1/padovani.pdf
PhD thesis: MathML Formatting
http://www.cs.unibo.it/~lpadovan/phd/main.pdf
"""
-- 
Robert Kern
rk...@uc...
"In the fields of hell where the grass grows high
 Are the graves of dreams allowed to die."
 -- Richard Harter

>>>>> "Darren" == Darren Dale <dd...@co...> writes:
 Darren> Let me make sure I understand this. If we map mathtext
 Darren> characters to unicode, and use freefont for now, will that
 Darren> help prepare MPL for STIX fonts? If there is an option
 Darren> available now that moves MPL in the direction of a
 Darren> permanent solution, then it seems like the decision is
 Darren> already made. 
What follows is a long post of getting unicode fonts to work with
mathtext, which is a very important goal. But there is another goal
which is also important that may serve your thesis needs well: the
ability to farm out text handling to TeX/LaTeX, either for ps or png
using dvitopng. 
Now, on to the unicode question.
In principle we should be able to substitute any set of unicode fonts
with any other, since they will all use the same encoding. Last time
I looked into replacing the bakoma fonts I spent a while looking at
the umbelleek fonts, but I came to the conclusion that they do not use
a unicode encoding, despite their author's later advocacy of unicode
 http://www.tug.org/TUGboat/Articles/tb19-3/tb60kinch.pdf
So I think freefont is a better path to pursue (I wasn't aware of
these until reading Baptiste's post); even though they are GPLd, they
will ease the path to integration with other unicode fontsets later
 Darren> Can we come up with some kind of a plan or
 Darren> design document for what steps we need to take? I will
 Darren> pick at it after work, if I understand what needs to be
 Darren> done.
I am happy to help, offer advice and pointers and so on, but there is
no definite set of steps I can lay out. The person who has their
boots on wading through the mud will have to make many of these
decisions. There is no 1-to-1 mapping between TeX symbols and
unicode. Most unicode symbols (ancient cypriot) have no TeX
equivalent and many TeX symbols have no unicode equivalent (eg there
is no unicode symbol for each of \sqrt, \Sqrt, \SQRT)
So some creative ways to handles these cases will have to be devised;
a good start would be to google search
 tex unicode
and do a little reading to get the lay of the land. There have been
previous efforts at mapping characters between TeX and unicode, and
I've worked on this before (see below). Also, search the archives for
any posts by Robert Kern on the issue of mathtext --- they are all
filled with sage advice and wonderful links that you will never find
even if you google for 1000 years. Unfortunately, the sourceforge
search engine is as sucky as their stats engine, so finding these
posts may be difficult.
 Darren> Now that the new formatter is complete, I have to find new
 Darren> ways to procrastinate. I will defend in August.
Hmm, in my experience, the having nothing to do is only the 2nd best
motivator for working on an open source project. The best one, of
course, is having a dissertation you should be working on. I'll try
and keep up with you :-)
Included below is a hodge-podge of some stuff I drudged out of my
examples and test directories related to fonts, mathtext and unicode
-- collectively they provide the tools required to put all these
pieces together. 
The following is a script to parse a unicode -> text mapping found at
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/examples/ -- grab the file TeX.txt
and run this script on it. The code parses that file builds a
dictionary from TeX->unicode
items = []
for line in file('TeX.txt'):
 line = line.strip()
 if not line.find('\\\\'): continue
 vals = line.split('\t')
 for val in vals:
 tup = val.split(' ')
 if len(tup)!=2: continue
 code, sym = tup
 if not sym.startswith('\\'): continue
 items.append((sym, code))
for k,v in items:
 o = ord(v.decode('utf-8'))
 
 #print k,v,o, hex(o)
 print " r'%s' : %d," % (k, o)
and generates output like
peds-pc311:~/python/mplsupport/test> python parse_tex.py 
 r'\alpha' : 945,
 r'\iota' : 953,
 r'\varrho' : 1009,
 r'\beta' : 946,
 r'\kappa' : 954,
 r'\sigma' : 963,
which you can use to create a dictionary mapping tex syms to unicode
indices. You can save this dictionary as a _mathtext_data dict, for
use by the mathtext module.
The next task is to take a set of fonts and build a mapping from
unicode index to fontname, glyph index. This will require some
mastery of ft2font. Last time I was working on this I wrote
examples/font_indexing.py, mainly as a reminder to myself, on how to
use the module to extract the relevant information from font files,
character names, glyph indexes and character codes. I now wish I had
added more comments <wink>. You may want to try this example, read
over it, and make sure you understand what it is doing (add comments
as you learn and commit the updates to CVS).
Many fonts have multiple character maps. Normally the 0 charmap is
unicode if there is a unicode char map. Let's look at the freefont
files and see how we can use the ft2font to find the font with \alpha
(should be at character code 945 from the results above). Below is
some code I wrote to iterate over a list of ttf files and print the
character codes, glyph indices and character names contained in those
files. I'm running this over all the fonts in the freefont dirs and
grepping for 945 and alpha to eliminate the noise
 test> python find_unicode_texsyms.py /usr/share/fonts/truetype/freefont/*.ttf|grep 945|grep alpha 
produces the following output
 FreeMonoBoldOblique.ttf 0 447 945 alpha
 FreeMonoBoldOblique.ttf 2 447 945 alpha
 FreeMonoBold.ttf 0 612 945 alpha
 FreeMonoBold.ttf 2 612 945 alpha
 FreeMonoOblique.ttf 0 651 945 alpha
 FreeMonoOblique.ttf 2 651 945 alpha
 FreeMono.ttf 0 679 945 alpha
 FreeMono.ttf 2 679 945 alpha
 FreeSansBoldOblique.ttf 0 394 945 alpha
 FreeSansBoldOblique.ttf 2 394 945 alpha
 FreeSansBold.ttf 0 438 945 alpha
 FreeSansBold.ttf 2 438 945 alpha
 FreeSansOblique.ttf 0 457 945 alpha
 FreeSansOblique.ttf 2 457 945 alpha
 FreeSans.ttf 0 570 945 alpha
 FreeSans.ttf 2 570 945 alpha
 FreeSerifBoldItalic.ttf 0 546 945 alpha
 FreeSerifBoldItalic.ttf 2 546 945 alpha
 FreeSerifBold.ttf 0 530 945 alpha
 FreeSerifBold.ttf 2 530 945 alpha
 FreeSerifItalic.ttf 0 527 945 alpha
 FreeSerifItalic.ttf 2 527 945 alpha
 FreeSerif.ttf 0 566 945 alpha
 FreeSerif.ttf 2 566 945 alpha
As mentioned, selecting charmap 0 is suppose to select a unicode
character map, and apparently charmap 2 is such a map. So you have
\alpha in a bunch of different styles (plain, bold, italic, etc -- how
to deal with all of this choice in the context of TeX/mathtext fonts
like rm, it, tt etc is where some of the artistry referred to above
comes in). 
Below is the code that generated this output -- hopefully it will give
you some more insight into how to use ft2font [BTW, if you take this
on, it would be really helpful if right now you open a notes file and
start a tutorial to self about what you are learning. I have to
relearn this stuff myself every time I work on it (and I wrote most of
the font code and the examples). There is no better time to write
helpful documentation than when learning. Someone may have to do this
again one day, and that someone may be you!]
import sys, os
from glob import glob
from matplotlib.font_manager import fontManager
from matplotlib.ft2font import FT2Font
from matplotlib.cbook import reverse_dict
for fname in sys.argv[1:]:
 #for fname in fontManager.ttffiles:
 font = FT2Font(fname)
 print 'loaded', fname, font.num_charmaps
 for i in range(font.num_charmaps):
 font.set_charmap(i)
 cmap = font.get_charmap()
 items = cmap.items()
 items.sort()
 fname = os.path.split(fname)[-1]
 for gind, code in items:
 name = font.get_glyph_name(gind)
 print fname, i, gind, code, name
 
OK, so now we have some mappings from TeX -> unicode and some idea of
how to map unicode symbols tofont names and glyph indices. Another
tool which you can look at to understand font handling and glyph
rendering is in the mpl examples dir. The following builds a standard
font table in a plot window
 examples> ./font_table_ttf.py /usr/share/fonts/truetype/freefont/FreeSans.ttf
This should be enough for tonight :-). We can talk by phone tomorrow
if you think it would help, or you can post questions here. It's good
to get some of this on record. I've spent many hours working on this
problem, but have never had the time and stamina to see it through.
mathtext in matplotlib has a lot of promise but the current
implementation is not satisfactory. Getting a good set of unicode
fonts working would be a significant step forward.
Thanks!
JDH