On 05/30/2013 02:27 PM, Chris Barker - NOAA Federal wrote: > On Thu, May 30, 2013 at 8:59 AM, Michael Droettboom <md...@stsci.edu> wrote: >> I've drafted a MEP with a plan to improve some of the text and font handling >> in matplotlib. >> >> I'd love any and all feedback. > nice writ-up and thanks for workign on this. > > One idea (alternative?) would be to put more effort into the > "mathtext" renderer. TeX itself, of course does an outstanding job of > laying out text, paragraphs, etc. I'm assuming that the core stuff is > already in mathtext, so adding better support for regular old non-math > text would be a less-than-huge deal. And we still wouldn't need the > full how-to-split-pages and all that code for MPL. That's an interesting idea, that we should definitely ruminate on. That still doesn't address the Unicode issues, which are really complex to get right -- I'd really rather depend on something else for that. But what you suggest might be the best way forward to improve the built-in rendering for a good fraction of users that don't really care about Unicode. > > Not sure about properly handling unicode issues, though modern TeX > does support unicode.
Right -- and I think moving to XeTeX for the "usetex" backend, which is now pretty widely available, might be a good improvement on that front. I still don't want to reimplement all of that, if I can avoid it. > > With a fully-function mathtex, it could be the default (only?) text > layout system for MPL, simplifying things quite a bit. I'm not sure that's realistic. The usetex backend gets a great deal of use, and I don't think it's only because it handles multiline text better -- it's also the easiest way to make the text match that of a larger TeX document in which it's included (though the new PGF backend goes some way to helping that in an entirely different way). It might be worth collating a list of reasons that users are using "usetex" to include in the MEP -- if we can address them all in another way, great, but if not it's not too difficult to keep something that already works fairly well working. The problem I have with it is not really that it exists, only that it has tendrils all throughout matplotlib that could be better localized into a single set of modules. > > ... just a thought. > > Thanks. Keep em coming! Mike ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Get 100% visibility into Java/.NET code with AppDynamics Lite It's a free troubleshooting tool designed for production Get down to code-level detail for bottlenecks, with <2% overhead. Download for free and get started troubleshooting in minutes. http://p.sf.net/sfu/appdyn_d2d_ap2 _______________________________________________ Matplotlib-devel mailing list Matplotlib-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/matplotlib-devel
