I've spent the last couple of days refactoring the matplotlib backends, fixing bugs and adding some functionality. Here's a synopsis of what's new. I encourage everyone to try it out so complaints and bugs can be handled before the major release. ** Note there are some API changes so please read about this below ** ** Note, GD users, GD rendering is significantly improved in my opinion. However, some of new functionality requires a recent version of gd and a patch of the latest gdmodule, see below ** What's new in matplotlib 0.50e GD supports clipping and antialiased line drawing. The line object has a new 'antialiased' property, that if true, the backend will render the line antialiased if supported. **You will need to upgrade to gd-2.0.15 or later and gdmodule-0.51. You will also need to replace _gdmodule.c with the code as described at http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/backends.html#GD. wild and wonderful bar charts You can provide an optional argument 'bottom' to the bar command to determine where the bottom of each bar is, default 0 for all. This enables stacked bar plots and candelstick plots -- examples/bar_stacked.py. Thanks to David Moore and John Gill for suggestions and code. Bugfixes (by backend) * All : the yticks on the right hand side were placed incorrectly, now fixed * All : ticklabels now make a more intelligent choice about how many significant digits to display * GD : An int truncation bug was causing the dotted lines to disappear * GD and GTK : Fixed line width to scale with DPI * GD : Fixed small text layout bug * GD : Fixed the constant for GD which maps pixels per inch - this should give better agreement with other backends witht he relative sizes of objects * GTK : Dash spacing was not properly scaling with DPI Figure backend refactored The figure functionality was split into a backend independent component Figure and a backend dependent component FigureCanvasBase. This completes the transition to a totally abstract figure interface and improves the ability the switch backends. See the file http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/API_CHANGES that comes with the src distro for information on migrating applications to the new API. All the backend specific examples have been updated to the new API. Enjoy, John Hunter