On Thu, Jul 19, 2012 at 3:17 PM, ObsessiveMathsFreak <
obsessivemathsfr...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I used sagemath which uses matplotlib as its plotting interface. After
> extensive investigation I was extremely disappointed to find that
> matplotlib has no fundamental support for drawing arrows at the ends of
> axes.
>
> Is there no way that such basic functionality could be included in the
> next matplotlib release. Add-ons such as artistsaxis are not really
> appropriate as they require extensive refactoring of code using splines
> or axes.
>
> A simple "endarrow=True" option on either splines or axes would be a
> very useful addition to the axis interface. Many people would be very
> grateful if you could consider adding this feature in the next release.
>
>
>
Agreed, this would be a wonderful feature, and is often requested. The
AxesGrid toolkit does provide this functionality
http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/examples/axes_grid/demo_axisline_style.html
but it would be nice to eventually move some of this into the standard
matplotlib axes object.
Two of the hurdles I foresee are:
* API -- there are many kinds of arrows and I am sure once this ability
is added, users are going to want to tweak the appearance. We will need to
have an easy way to turn them on, select which axes to have them for, the
type of arrow and their size and other properties. Finally, I am sure this
will need to be at least partly accessible through rcparams.
* Locating -- If we place the arrowhead at the very end of the axis
spine, we possibly run the risk of the arrowhead being clipped by the
bounding box rectangle. We would also need it to be taken into account for
tight_layout and for bbox_inches='tight'. On the other hand, one could
position the arrow head such that the tip of the arrow is at the end of the
spine, but one runs the risk of colliding with the tick and tick labels.
By no means should this discourage someone from attempting this. But I
wanted to outline some of the considerations one would need to take into
account while creating this feature.
Cheers!
Ben Root
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