On Tue, Nov 18, 2008 at 4:25 AM, Mike Hansen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> What would you recommend as the best way going about this? I'm > willing to put some work in on this. There was someone back in July > who posted some code moving in this direction, but it didn't feel like > it was the right way to do things. He didn't get any response from > the list. That was Tony's work, and it is a shame we didn't give him more feedback. It is definitely an important enhancement. Sometimes the things that are harder get marked with a "star" in my inbox, and the things that are easier get tackled right away, and the harder things get pushed down the queue. Which is why I encourage folks to make gentle reminders: the silence is usually not lack of interest, but lack of time. You should start by taking a look at where Tony left off. I will review his code too, and when we have both had a chance to digest it, we can discuss a plan of attack. http://www.nabble.com/Modifications-to-axis.py-to-allow-more-flexibility-in-positioning-axis-lines%2C-ticks%2C-etc.-td18573959.html#a18573959 Tony may be interested in contributing too. Reading over his email, one of the things that stumped him was trying to get this done right and maintain backwards compatibility. That is admirable, and we should try to achieve that where possible, but I don't think it is a requirement. This is a major feature enhancement, and is one of the things that have kept me from releasing mpl as 1.0, so if we need some breakage to get there we can live with it. Not too many people tweak the axis layout, in part because there is not much to tweak. Also, most use the Axes front end helper methods (eg ax.get_xticklabels()) which will insulate them from a reorg at the Axis layer. There are two related problems here: one easier, one harder. We can start with the easier one. The easy one is to have a "detachable axis". Right now we have one on the right and one on the left for the x-axis. We may as well generalize this to allow folks to have as many as they want and put them whereever they want (center, offset farther to the left, etc.). It would be nice to support a different set of tick locators and formatters for each axis, eg you could have a left axis in dollars and a right axis in euros. Note this is not the same thing as having a different scale, in the sense of the two_scales example, this is just two different formatting of the same scale. The harder problem is supporting an arbitrary number of axis instances each with its own transform, etc. Eg generalizing the two_scales example. I suggest you punt on that one for now. If you really want to keep this easy, you can forget all about the locators and formatters and just focus on allowing the user to place the axis lines wherever they want, using the standard Axis locator and formatter for all the axis lines. That is probably the place to start -- we can always try to beef it up later. That part should be fairly easy. Another enhancement that would be nice would be to support a TextCollection for the tick labels. Drawing the tick labels is actually a pretty big bottleneck in the whole plot rendering time, and since the properties are naturally homogeneous (eg the rotation, the fontsize) we could probably save some time using a collection. JDH ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by the Moblin Your Move Developer's challenge Build the coolest Linux based applications with Moblin SDK & win great prizes Grand prize is a trip for two to an Open Source event anywhere in the world http://moblin-contest.org/redirect.php?banner_id=100&url=/ _______________________________________________ Matplotlib-users mailing list Matplotlib-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/matplotlib-users
