Hey, glad it might actually be of use to other people. I know I've
been awful about finishing things, as anything that doesn't directly
relate to my thesis has fallen to wayside as of late. When I was
investigating saving it as an XML format, I remember coming across a
problem. If I remember correctly, you could easily write a backend
that would just spit out the proper XML, but it wouldn't be a very
good XML file -- it would just be a collection of 'draw_lines', etc..
The current format that I've been using looks more like:
<pylab>
<figure name="foo">
<axes pos="1,1">
<plot name="bar">
<params name="a" value="10.5" type="float"/>
<params name="b" value="baz" type="str"/>
</plot>
</axes>
<axes pos="1,2">
<plot name="bar">
<params name="a" value="0.53" type="float"/>
<params name="b" value="zab" type="str"/>
</axes>
</figure>
</pylab>
It has a plug-in architecture, so it looks for all python files in a
specified directory, and that is how it decides which plot function
to call (in this case, it would find a class 'bar' within those
files). The class specifies what arguments it can take, which are
required arguments, and which are optional (as well as default values).
What made sense to me, would be to simply create plot classes that
corresponded with the draw_line, draw_arc, etc. That way, to render a
saved XML file, would simply consist of having those classes make the
correct backend calls. But, there doesn't seem an easy way to
generate this with the backends, as they know nothing about figures,
axes, subplot, etc.
So it seems like matplotlib would have to have a separate way for
saving a native format. I think this would be a huge gain, as it
would allow figures to be generated, saved, edited, reopened/
regenerated, but would involve yet another output method.
I could very well be missing something obvious, if so please correct me!
As for the SVG, I'll have to look into it. I think that's probably an
easier issue, as I believe you could construct it in a similiar
fashion to the other backends, as a collection of lines.
Abe
On Aug 7, 2006, at 4:14 PM, Andrew Straw wrote:
> Dear Abraham,
>
> I'm sorry it's taken so long to get back to you. I didn't see any
> other
> responses on the list, but I think this is a super idea (although I
> have
> yet to look at the code). In particular I like your idea to save to
> your
> XML format. Then we could plot to an XML file, and replot (later) with
> whatever backend we need at the time. It sounds great. We could
> even zip
> the file automatically (or just the data parts of the innards) so
> they'd
> hopefully be pretty small.
>
> I suspect that if you get the XML backend working and incorporate it,
> you'll have a lot of users trying it out when they see it in their
> "save
> as" format list.
>
> Relatedly, is there any way would could add to the SVG backend that
> would give us essentially this and, simultaneously, a valid SVG
> file? Is
> SVG even "officially" extensible in this way? (I don't know much about
> SVG or XML.)
>
> Cheers!
> Andrew
>
> Abraham Schneider wrote:
>> Hi. A long while ago I had sent out an email asking if anyone was
>> interested in an XML library for plotting with matplotlib. It seemed
>> the general consensus was no, though it might be nice as a backend
>> for
>> saving files. So I developed the XML library for my own purposes, and
>> have been using it for some time.
>>
>> I thought I might as well clean it up, package it, and release it in
>> the wild. I'm not sure if this would even qualify as an alpha
>> release,
>> perhaps more of a RFC, but if anyone is interested, and wants to give
>> some comments, let me know. While it has gotten a good amount of use
>> (including a soon to be published paper), it has evolved to fit my
>> needs more than anything else. So in the clean up, I tried to
>> refractor some saneness into it, and had to fix some things in the
>> process. I tried to test as much of it as possible, but I'm sure I
>> forgot some obvious things as well.
>>
>> It is trying to serve 3 purposes:
>> (1) Framework for making publishable figures easy
>> (2) Provide an easy way to allow pylab figures to be saveable/
>> loadable
>> and editable by human
>> (3) Provide a general framework for a higher level plotting library
>>
>> I'm hoping to in the near future write the backend to pylab to
>> save in
>> the XML format. It should (hopefully) be fairly trivial..
>>
>> It can be found (this includes some documentation and examples):
>> www.cns.nyu.edu/~abes/xmlplot.tar.gz
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> Abe
>>
>>
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