2009/12/16 Joey Wilson <doughywil...@gmail.com>: > Does anyone know the status of development for Matplotlib persistent figure > saving? I would like to be able to save the figures from matplotlib in an > editable form, without flattening down to an image file. The closest thing > to this right now is the SVG output, but a native mpl format would be > better. I need to be able to save the figure, so that later it can be > loaded, edited, and re-saved. I know that this topic has been somewhat > discussed in the past, but I believe it is desperately needed, so I thought > I would bring it back up. > Let me say why I think this feature is so essential. Anyone who is in > research or academia knows that figures often need to be edited when a > publication comes back from peer review. It's already happened to me many > times, and I've learned that I absolutely have to save my figures for later > editing to save myself a lot of time. Some people have argued that a script > that generates the plots/figures should be saved, and that if you need to > edit the figure, just re-run the script. The problem with this argument is > that scientific plots often take hours, days, or even weeks of computation > to generate. For example, generating a bit-error-rate curve in > communications takes days. Therefore, always re-running from a script is > just not practical. > Now, I understand that resources are limited, so I would be willing to raise > some money to get this feature added to Matplotlib. It's desperately needed > by myself and many others in the community. I would really like to > completely replace Matlab with Python,Scipy, and Matplotlib. MPL is an > excellent tool, and it could be even more useful/professional with the > addition of a figure save feature. > Any thoughts?
Leaving entirely aside any question of persistence, do you find matplotlib plots to be modifiable in the ways you want? I find for anything beyond minor changes of axes, I end up rerunning my plotting command anyway - for example, I suppose it's possible to change a line on an existing plot from red to black, but I just rerun the plotting command. What about adding/removing error bars? changing the number of bins, range, or starting position of your histogram? plotting the square root instead of the logarithm of the image values? removing bogus data points (or adding back in points you I previously removed)? It seems to me that all of these things require me to keep the original data around. Since that's the case, I usually generate my plots in one of two ways: either I just write a script that runs the calculation and generates the plot, or I write one script to generate the data and save it to disk, and another to plot the data from disk. This is sometimes mildly annoying when a script is just a bit slow, but not enough to warrant saving the data to disk. In those cases if I must I can run the script under ipython and modify the plot, then save out the modifications to a script. Now, if you want a very-low-effort way to save your data to disk, I agree that would be valuable to have, but there are, in ascending order of complexity and power, the native numpy data format, pyfits, and pytables/pyhdf. Anne ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This SF.Net email is sponsored by the Verizon Developer Community Take advantage of Verizon's best-in-class app development support A streamlined, 14 day to market process makes app distribution fast and easy Join now and get one step closer to millions of Verizon customers http://p.sf.net/sfu/verizon-dev2dev _______________________________________________ Matplotlib-devel mailing list Matplotlib-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/matplotlib-devel
