matplotlib-devel Mailing List for matplotlib

This is the second bugfix release of the 0.54 series
Here's the CHANGELOG
 * Rewrote ft2font using CXX as part of general memory leak fixes;
 also fixed transform memory leaks
 * Fixed several problems with log ticks and scaling 
 * Fixed width/height issues for images 
 * Fixed draw_if_interactive bug for semilogx; 
 * Fixed text clipping to clip to axes 
 * Fixed leading newline text and multiple newline text 
 * Fixed plot_date to return lines 
 * Fixed plot to work with x or y having shape N,1 or 1,N 
 * Added renderer markeredgewidth attribute of Line2D. 
 * Fixed tick label clipping to work with navigation.
 * Added renderer grouping commands to support groups in
 SVG/PS. 
 * Fixed, this time I really mean it, the singleton plot
 plot([0]) scaling bug; Fixed Flavio's shape = N,1 bug 
 * added colorbar 
 * Made some changes to the matplotlib.colors.Colormap to
 propertly support clim 
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=80706&package_id=82474&release_id=244568

Jeremy,
> Not really. I am mostly interested in interactive usage, hence I
> am simply firing python or ipython from console, and then in
> python shell issuing couple of commands like:
>
> >>> from matplotlib.matlab import *
> >>> plot((1,2,3))
>
>
> You probably want.
>
> import matplotlib
> matplotlib.interactive(True)
> matplotlib.use('WX')
> from matplotlib.matlab import *
> plot([1,2,3])
What I forgot to mention is that I changed .matplotlibrc to use WX and 
interactive mode. In fact, all tests I did were performed the same way 
-- change .matplotlibrc to choose backend and set interactive to True or 
False, then open python from console try import/plot, open pythonwin try 
import/plot. I presume there is no difference between setting 
backend/interactivity via .matplotlibrc or via explicit calls to 
matplotlib api.
> There are a couple of issues I keep meaning to get around to fixing. 
> One problem is that I don't really use interactive mode, so I don't 
> notice things so much in that area (not that this is an excuse...). 
> The key difficulty is that the mainloop behaves subtly differently 
> when running interactively and from a script. Every time I make one 
> work correctly, it seems to break the other in unpredictable ways.
Yeah, quite a lot of different options to test, a lot of platforms, not 
to mention that testing GUI is hard by itself. World would be so much 
better if one could easily unittest GUIs.
>
> The -dWX option tells matplotlib to use the Wx renderer to run the 
> script. You can also set the preferred default renderer in the 
> matplotlibrc file. As installed, I think this defaults to GtkAgg, but 
> you can change it (see http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/.matplotlibrc).
Oh, so that's yet another way to switch backends? Good to know.
> Boa is quite buggy in places, and imposes its own way of working with 
> Wx that doesn't suit me (at least for larger projects). However, the 
> debugger is worth the effort.
I see. I guess I have to find a combination of satisfactory IDE / 
matplotlib backend. From what I see now, Boa is pretty much the last 
resort for windows.
BTW, does anyone know what the situation is with various IDE / 
matplotlib backends compatibility on Linux? Particularly I am curious to 
know if there is a way to use matplotlib from Eric3, which is a QT based 
app.
> We've looked at different ways to deal with the mainloop problem, but 
> it is difficult to find a portable approach. It would probably be 
> quite straightforward to look at sys.argv and issue a different 
> matplotlib.use() call from there. Not sure that this would be easy to 
> generalise (as there are so many possible shells).
>
> In the longer term, John Hunter has been looking at putting the GUI 
> into a separate thread, to avoid mainloop problems. A partial solution 
> exists within scipy for this, but only applies, if memory serves, to 
> Wx only, whereas we would need a solution for all backends. We're 
> aware that this is quite annoying, although to be honest I think that 
> most people use only one backend with their preferred tools.
I see your point, the only reason I asked about automatic backend 
selection is because I may want to use matplotlib from different tools, 
say an IDE, xemacs, ipython, and it might be that they will require 
different backends, so I'll have to select one manually every time which 
is quite annoying. I guess we'll have to cope with it for now, hoping 
that one day you'll put GUI into a separate thread and it will resolve 
all issues.
BTW, how about plotting from separate process? Pickle data, send via 
some interprocess communication or even temporary file to plotting 
process. This should not be too hard to implement, right? It might be 
yet another backend.
--Kirill