Sandro Tosi wrote: > Hi Sam, > > On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 09:35, sam tygier <sam...@ya...> wrote: >> I think this topic has come up before, but i don't think anything has >> resulted from it. >> Correct, because the capability would require a *lot* of work to implement, and most of us don't see a compelling need; we believe that a better practice is to structure one's work so that plotting is separated from data (result) generation in any cases where the latter is highly time-consuming. >> I'd like a way for saving a plot from from matplotlib, so that it can be >> re-rendered later, possibly with a different backend, maybe to a different >> size, and maybe with changes to the labels. This would save me having to >> rerun the simulation that generated the plot. >> >> Ideally this would work by having a save_plot() function, that would save >> all state of the current plot into a file. This could then be loaded by a >> program to regenerate that plot. > > Can't this be achieved by pickling/unpickling the mpl objects? Didn't > manage to test it, but it should work. No, this has been discussed several times. Quite a bit of work would be required to make all the extension code compatible with pickling. More work, more complexity, more difficult code maintenance and testing. It's not worth it, given the developer resources available for mpl. > > Of course, it might fall in uncompatibility from source (pickling) > environment and the destination (unpickling) one. Yes, pickling is fundamentally unreliable, and should be used only under controlled, non-critical circumstances, such as for caching. Eric > > Regards,