matplotlib is a 2D graphics package that produces plots from python scripts, the python shell, or embeds them in your favorite python GUI -- wx, gtk, tk, fltk currently supported with qt in the works. Unlike many python plotting alternatives is written in python, so it is easy to extend. matplotlib is used in the finance industry, web application servers, and many scientific and enginneering disciplines. With a large community of users and developers, matplotlib is approaching the goal of having a full featured, high quality, 2D plotting library for python.
A lot of development has gone into matplotlib since the last major release, which I'll summarize here. For details, see the notes for the incremental releases at http://matplotlib.sf.net/whats_new.html. Major changes since matplotlib-0.60 - The alpha version of the users guide - http://matplotlib.sf.net/users_guide.pdf. There are still a number of sections to be completed, but it's a start! - The matlab namespace renamed pylab - if you are upgrading from a version older than 0.64, please remove site-packages/matplotlib before upgrading. See http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/matlab_to_pylab.py - New plot types: contour plots (contour), polar charts (polar), horizontal bar charts (barh), pie charts (pie), sparse matrix visualization (spy and spy2). Eg, http://matplotlib.sf.net/screenshots.html#polar_demo - Full ipython http://ipython.scipy.org integration in the "pylab" mode for interactive control of matplotlib plots from the python shell. - A significantly improved interactive toolbar for panning, zooming, zoom to rect - see http://matplotlib.sf.net/tutorial.html#toolbar2. - New backends: FLTK, Cairo, GTKCairo - Text - rotated mathtext, mathtext for postscript, text bounding boxes - Colormaps - 14 colormaps built-in http://matplotlib.sf.net/screenshots.html#pcolor_demo - Images - performance optimizations for 4x faster large image handling, PIL support, interpolation and colorbar improvements, imread - Event handling for capturing mouse clicks, movements, keypresses, etc. - same pylab interface works across GUIs. See examples/keypress_demo.py, examples/picker_demo.py, examples/coords_demo.py - set and get matlab style property introspection - http://matplotlib.sf.net/examples/set_and_get.py - improved dates handling for dates and date string formatting from 0000-9999, eg http://matplotlib.sf.net/screenshots.html#finance_work - Be sure to check out the 120 examples at http://matplotlib.sf.net/examples Home page : http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net Downloads : http://sourceforge.net/projects/matplotlib Screenshots : http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/screenshots.html Tutorial : http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/tutorial.html Credits : http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/credits.html John Hunter -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
