On Thu, 18 Oct 2012 10:45:24 +0100 Damon McDougall <damon.mcdoug...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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). Great! Using e.g. optparse, multiple data files shouldn't be too complicated. I might need to look into GNU graph. I was ignorant about it's existence till it was mentioned here on the MPL list. > > 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. Looking forward! I think a separate repository might be the best option as you probably do not want to modify MPL in any way, but rather build your scripts on top of it. > 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). The good thing is that any command-line "frontend" certainly does not need to care about backend specifics. The problem is completely separable. > 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. I typically "try:" to import relevant packages and set a flag in case that doesn't work. Using this approach, all dependencies really remain optional. > 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. In case your approach looks right, I am pretty sure you'll find contributors quickly. Good luck! Cheers Alex ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 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
