On Tue, Sep 14, 2010 at 11:12 AM, Jan Skowron <jan.skow...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
> apropos this offset discussion.
> matplotlib makes offsets not aligned to the full tens or some other
> easy number with small amount of non-zero digits in front?
>
> For example having ticks:
> 4917, 4918, 4919, 4920, 4921, 4922
>
> it will now display:
> 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 with offset 4916 (of even +4.916e3)
>
> this makes reading values on the axis really really hard as every time
> one have to perform not obvious summations with all digits of length.
> It would be beneficial to have as a default behaviour some
> optimization of offsets to have it as some basic number for easy
> reading instead of current behaviour that tries to minimize the number
> of digits in the ticks and starts from a low number like 1 or 0.05 or
> so.
> In our case the best display would be:
>
> 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22 with offset 4900
>
> So we minimize the number of non-zero digits in offset and not a
> number of digits in tick labels.
>
> Another more ridiculous example (from life) are ticks with values:
>
> 4916.25, 4916.30, 4916.35, 4916.40, 4916.45
>
> are displayed as:
>
> 0.05, 0.10, 0.15, 0.20, 0.25 with offset +4.9162e3
>
> and with good algorithm should be displayed as:
>
> 0.25, 0.30, 0.35, 0.40, 0.45 with offset 4962 (nottice that not
> +4.962e3 as it usually displays now)
>
> and if we would cross the boundary between 4962 and 4963 than ticks
> should look like:
> 2.80, 2.85, 2.90, 2.95, 3.00, 3.05 with offset 4960
>
>
> In my opinion the current behaviour of offsets really hampers the
> usability of these at all, and probably 90% of users spent some time
> on nothing but trying to figure out how to turn this thing off (thanks
> for sending this solutions here).
>
> So this is message to signal or show the need for fixing this
> algorithm. For now I think that the title of this post: "weird
> behaviour in x axis", really summarize current offset algorithm
> nicely.
>
>
> Thanks for your comments,
> Jan
>
>
I like that idea as it is certainly more intuitive. Essentially, it would
find the most significant bits that are common to all ticks and use that for
the offset.
Does anybody know where the current code is? I would be willing to take a
look at it today and see what I can do.
Thanks,
Ben Root
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