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On 7 Oct 2011, at 4:56 PM, Daniel Hyams wrote:
> I'm wanting to highlight the artist under the cursor with a 
> transparent Rectangle patch. To do this, I have very, roughly, in a 
> mouse motion handler,
>
> under = self.figure.hitlist(ev)
> if under:
> artist = under[0]
> bbox = artist.get_window_extent()
> highlight = 
> matplotlib 
> .patches 
> .Rectangle 
> (xy 
> = 
> bbox.min,width=bbox.width,height=bbox.height,alpha=0.2,color='yellow')
> # further code to blit the last captured graph region with 
> highlight drawn on top
>
> The main problem is that all artists don't implement 
> get_window_extent(); a Text object does, and a legend object does, 
> but the Axis objects do not.
>
> So is there a general way to get the bounding box of an artist?
Did you ever find a way to get the bounding box of an artist? I could 
use this too.
Michael.

I had found it reasonably straightforward to install matplotlib on 10.6 (much harder on 10.7 but that's a story that somebody more versed than I should tell). I was stumped by trying to install basemap because I took the easy way out with the Geos dependency and installed the latter via mac port; this, however, does not give you the include directory. So, I removed Geos from my mac port tree and installed it by hand (in /Users/Shared so that I can see it easily). Then I had to use "sudo python setup.py install" so that the setup could access the python installation. The first test worked just fine so I appear to be in good shape. FYI, tony rollett.