matplotlib-users Mailing List for matplotlib

>>>>> "Nelson" == Nelson Minar <ne...@mo...> writes:
 Nelson> John Hunter <jdh...@ac...> writes:
 >> There are a lot of good plotting libraries out there. I'll
 >> pitch mine. http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net
 Nelson> Thanks for posting this! I've been using gdchart for a
 Nelson> long time because it's simple and the graphs aren't too
 Nelson> bad. But it's very limited, in particular your X axis has
 Nelson> to be equally spaced.
Hi Nelson, thanks for the email and the detailed comments. It would
be great to have you join the mailing list - other users would benefit
from your comments -
http://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/matplotlib-users
 Nelson> I spent about an hour with matplotlib. It's clear you put
 Nelson> a lot of work into this, and I think this could be a
 Nelson> really great library. Some thoughts for you from a casual
 Nelson> user:
 Nelson> The installation prerequisites are a bit daunting but on a
 Nelson> Debian system it's not too bad. Debian has many of the
 Nelson> packages you need: apt-get install python2.3-numeric
 Nelson> python2.3-numarray python2.3-numeric-ext apt-get install
 Nelson> fonttools libgd2-dev python2.3-gtk2 python2.3-numeric-ext
 Nelson> is easy to forget: you need that for FFT and MLab.
I'll update the web page with this information for debian users.
Debian is great; unfortunately, I don't get much opportunity to use it
so I haven't gone through the process of installing matplotlib on
debian. There was some interest on the mailing list earlier about
getting matplotlib packaged for debian, and an RFP was made, but I
don't there has been any any progress on this front. Charles, Nathan,
any comments here?
 Nelson> The only things I had to install from sources were
 Nelson> TTFQuery and gdmodule, and both of those were easy.
 Nelson> I'd like to use this module as a simple thing to create
 Nelson> PNGs of graphs from data to put on web pages. The GD
 Nelson> driver is most of what I need, and the idea that I could
 Nelson> also do postscript output is great. But the packaging of
 Nelson> matplotlib is a bit funky. The most confusing thing was
 Nelson> the way you read sys.argv - that's probably not good for a
 Nelson> resuable library.
I agree to a certain extent. But I don't modify the args and they
will be without effect if you use the incantation, as you did
 import matplotlib 
 matplotlib.use('GD')
Mainly, I did it because I wanted an easy way to switch between
backends without switching scripts. There are other ways to do this
however. Unless the presence of the sys.argv is causing a problem, I
am hesitant to remove it to maintain backwards compatibility. If you
can think of a problem, please let me know.
 Nelson> I was also mystified as to how to set the plotsize using
 Nelson> the matlab module. I gave up and ended up doing something
 Nelson> else, but it was so much work I felt like I probably did
 Nelson> something wrong:
 Nelson> import matplotlib
 Nelson> matplotlib.use('GD')
 Nelson> from matplotlib.backends import Figure
 Nelson> from matplotlib.axes import Subplot
 Nelson> f = Figure(figsize=(3, 2), dpi=100)
 Nelson> a = Subplot(111)
 Nelson> a.plot([1,2,3,4], [1,4,9,16])
 Nelson> f.add_axis(a)
 Nelson> f.print_figure("nelson2.png", 100)
You're right on the money here. The ability to control the dpi,
figsize and other attributes from the matlab interface is limited. I
think I'll add kwargs to the fig command to enable this, and plan to
go to a backend specific config file for the next release -- a
.matplotlibrc file containing a dictionary that provided default font,
figsize, dpi, etc, for each backend. But beyond this, it is important
to be able to control these attributes at the script level using the
matlab interface.
I'm glad you figured out the workaround by using the API.
JDH

Sounds awesomely powerful - not since the development of John Harrison's clocks will navigation have taken such a great step forward :-)
----- Original Message -----
From: John Hunter <jdh...@ac...>
Date: 2003年11月16日 07:50:53 -0600
To: "Gary Ruben" <ga...@em...>
Subject: Re: [Matplotlib-users] Navigation toolbar redraw button
> >>>>> "Gary" == Gary Ruben <ga...@em...> writes:
> 
> Gary> I think it's important to always have an easy way of zooming
> Gary> out to show the full plot, so if you implement your saved
> Gary> view idea and don't want to add a 'fit to full data' button,
> Gary> I think having a 'fit to full data' checkpoint automatically
> Gary> added is important. It might be even be worth looking into
> Gary> cacheing the full view to speed its rendering. That way, you
> Gary> could quickly navigate by zooming to full and then using a
> Gary> rectangle zoom to your area of interest.
> 
> Combining my original thoughts with yours and Charles, then. How
> about the following? Allow the user to select the old style toolbar
> from a config file, but the new toolbar would
> 
> 1) lose all the left, right, up down buttons, in favor of a single
> 'hand' icon that allows you to move the view limits by 'grabbing
> them in the axes and moving them around. With x or y key pressed
> the pan motion will be contained to the respective axis. The
> mouse button which activates this in the axes should be easily
> configurable so as to not class with application developers.
> 
> 2) have a zoom in and zoom out button that work on both axis
> symmetrically unless the 'x' or 'y' modifier keys are pressed in
> which case work only on that axis. Allow similar functionality
> with the mouse in the axes, eg wheel mouse, as Charles suggested
> or mouse-3 as vtk interactor windows use. Then you could pan and
> zoom in an axes without ever removing your mouse from the axes
> lim. 
> 
> 3) have a zoom rectangle tool that allows you to zoom to a selected
> rectangle, constrained to maintain axis ratio if CTRL is pressed
> 
> 4) have a zoom to data button that changes viewlim to incorporate
> entire dataset
> 
> 5) use the 'views' navigation with forward / mark / and back buttons
> that allows you to navigate between views
> 
> 6) lose the redraw button, obsolete
> 
> 7) have a savefig button which allows you to set the dpi, filename
> and backend, so you can output with ps, gd, or gtk backend
> 
> 8) close window unchanged.
> 
> Further comments?
> 
> JDH
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