This is great! Absolutely a much-needed and much-requested feature.
I wonder, however, about the need for function-specific color cycles.
Is there a use case there? I'd be just as happy with a single global
color cycle that all functions would use.
I also like the suggestion of a "style" class that would store a bunch
of drawing attributes on a single object.
From that, a feature that might be nice would be the ability to pass
"style='last'" (or something) to a plotting function and have it use the
last style in the cycle again. This would allow one to draw (for
example) a line and a bar plot that are related in the same color, and
then draw another line and bar pair in a different color. But that's
icing on top of the more important features you've already proposed.
Mike
On 01/04/2012 09:52 PM, Benjamin Root wrote:
Hello all,
So, I am getting to the point where I need to implement a color
cycling mechanism throughout pyplot. So, before I get too deep in
implementing it, I have some thoughts that I need feedback on.
1) Not all plotting functions use color cycling right now. Currently,
only plot() and any function that calls plot in its process (such as
errorbar()). Glaring omissions are bar() and scatter(), and pie()
could also benefit from having a uniform cycling mechanism. So, the
issue going forward is, do we want to enable common cycling for all
the pyplot/axes plotting functions which would require updating the
test images and break backwards compatibility (in a sense), or do we
want to have a per-function default rcparams that would contain
one-element cycles that would effectively maintain current drawing
results?
2) I also have the need to implement line-style cycling for b&w
publications. Of course if I implement that, then why not
hatch-cycling? marker-cycling? I have seen use-cases for all of these,
and I am considering how to have a generalized framework for this. So
my question is, what attributes would we like to see cycle-able? Here
is a short list and some usecases I have come up with. Please extend
this with ideas of your own.
color - plot(), errorbar(), scatter(), bar(), hist(), pie(), stem()
linestyle - plot(), errorbar(), stem()
hatch - bar(), hist(), pie()
marker - plot(), errorbar(), scatter(), stem()
linewidth? facecolor/edgecolor? joinstyle?
3) rcparam names. I was thinking about how to name these cycles in
the matplotlibrc file. Possibly:
cycle.colors
cycle.linestyles
cycle.hatches
cycle.markers
And these would represent the global default, meanwhile,
function-specific cycles could be given by:
cycle.colors.pie
cycle.colors.bar
cycle.linestyles.plot
cycle.linestyles.errorbar
I was thinking that in code, one would access the full name attribute
for the function, and I would extend the __get__ function to
intelligently fall back to the global default if the full-name
attribute is not specified. However, would there be confusion in a
situation such as a person who wanted to use barh() but only had
specified cycle.colors.bar?
4) Ultimately, my goal is to be able to create some typical profiles
that have useful cycle specs, and possibly make some available as
convenience functions, such as a b&w mode. Such a mode would set the
default colormap to a grayscale-friendly colorscale, and use line
style, hatch and marker cycles instead of a full color cycle.
Thoughts? Comments?
Cheers!
Ben Root
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