On Thu, Oct 18, 2012 at 10:10 AM, Alexander Eberspaecher <alexander.eberspaec...@ovgu.de> wrote: > Hello, > > On Wed, 17 Oct 2012 11:38:27 +0100 > Damon McDougall <damon.mcdoug...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> How do people feel about perhaps adding a matplotlib version, mocking >> the same calling signature as graph? >> >> I think the most important question is: would it be useful? > > Yes, this would certainly be useful! I think there are people > unfamiliar with Python, but rather excited about MPL's plotting > capabilities. > > I personally would want it to read data from white-space separated text > files (np.loadtxt()), probably CSV files, and HDF5 files (e.g. using > h5py, if available). > > To be useful for different purposes, I'd want the tool to be able to use > different backends (producing e.g. PNG output in case you need a figure > to send via e-mail or PGF output in case you are preparing a LaTeX > document). Matplotlibrc should be hidden from the user. > > As Gnuplot was specifically mentioned in another e-mail in this thread, > let me use that opportunity to mention that MPL falls behind Gnuplot in > terms of line styles. Using MPL, I found ls="-" and maybe ls="--" to be > useful, whereas Gnuplot offers 9 linestyles that are easy to > distinguish visually. Compare e.g. the figure linked in > http://www.der-schnorz.de/2010/09/gnuplot-colors-presentations-papers-and-contrast/ > In case this is of general interest, we might discuss that in a new > thread. > > As a side note, personally, for text file visualisation, I often use > this dirty MPL plotting plugin for the text editor of my choice (Geany): > https://github.com/aeberspaecher/GeanyPlot > A command line tool would of course be preferred. > > Cheers > > Alex
Ok wow, awesome feedback! I started on this yesterday morning to see how it would go, and I've already got something working that mimics the command-line syntax of GNU's `graph` (except it currently only supports one data file as input). I'm currently just developing on a local feature branch in the matplotlib repository, but I'm happy to pull it out to a different repo and announce it here once I make some more ground on it. I haven't pushed anything yet. If I do I'll make an announcement here. One thing I have noticed is that GNU's `graph` is rather fast. Compared to matplotlib, GNU's `graph` blows matplotlib out of the water when it comes to speed. Though, in my opinion, matplotlib wins when it comes to output quality. As far as I'm concerned, quality wins over speed but I realise that there needs to be some speed improvements in matplotlib's backends. I have noticed that text takes quite a while to process in the backend (currently using Agg for PDF and PNG output). Regarding input data file-type, I agree, supporting those formats would expand our userbase considerably. There are already some helper functions in matplotlib.cbook for reading csv-type files. One downside of supporting lots of different file-types is that there will be more (optional) dependencies. Personally, when I just want to see statistics from a computational run, I think I will find this rather helpful. I think I should be able to make this public fairly soon. Furthermore, it will be trivial to install (copy and paste to the /usr/local/bin directory). The command-line utility is literally just a python script (with executable permissions) that parses command-line arguments and sets up plot and figure parameters. Of course, it may be the case in the future that it gets rather large and needs to be made more modular. Right-o, back to more procrastinating. Thanks for all the encouragement! :) -- Damon McDougall http://www.damon-is-a-geek.com B2.39 Mathematics Institute University of Warwick Coventry West Midlands CV4 7AL United Kingdom ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Everyone hates slow websites. So do we. Make your web apps faster with AppDynamics Download AppDynamics Lite for free today: http://p.sf.net/sfu/appdyn_sfd2d_oct _______________________________________________ Matplotlib-users mailing list Matplotlib-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/matplotlib-users
