matplotlib

per freem wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> To annotate my figures with Greek letters, I use the following:
>
> import matplotlib
> matplotlib.use('PDF')
> import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
> from matplotlib import rc
> rc('font',**{'family':'sans-serif','sans-serif':['Helvetica']})
> plt.rcParams['ps.useafm'] = True
> rc('font',**{'family':'sans-serif','sans-serif':['Helvetica']})
> plt.rcParams['pdf.fonttype'] = 42
> # plot figure
> # ...
> # annotate figure
> plt.xlabel(r'$\mu$ = 50')
> plt.ylabel(r'$\sigma$ = 1.5')
>
> This makes the equal symbol and everything to the right of it in the
> Helvetica font, as intended, and the Greek symbols default to the
> usual TeX font (which I believe is Times New Roman.)
>
> How can I make it so the font used for the Greek letters is the
> "Symbol" font instead?  It's important for me not to have it appear in
> the default Times font of TeX.
>   
There's information about changing the math font here:

http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/users/mathtext.html#fonts

You may be able to use "Symbol" as a custom font, but this is untested, 
as far as I know.  It would have to contain a Unicode mapping to be usable.

Mike

-- 
Michael Droettboom
Science Software Branch
Operations and Engineering Division
Space Telescope Science Institute
Operated by AURA for NASA

On Tue, Jan 26, 2010 at 11:29 AM, Michael Droettboom <mdroe@...:

> per freem wrote:
> > Hi all,
> >
> > To annotate my figures with Greek letters, I use the following:
> >
> > import matplotlib
> > matplotlib.use('PDF')
> > import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
> > from matplotlib import rc
> > rc('font',**{'family':'sans-serif','sans-serif':['Helvetica']})
> > plt.rcParams['ps.useafm'] = True
> > rc('font',**{'family':'sans-serif','sans-serif':['Helvetica']})
> > plt.rcParams['pdf.fonttype'] = 42
> > # plot figure
> > # ...
> > # annotate figure
> > plt.xlabel(r'$\mu$ = 50')
> > plt.ylabel(r'$\sigma$ = 1.5')
> >
> > This makes the equal symbol and everything to the right of it in the
> > Helvetica font, as intended, and the Greek symbols default to the
> > usual TeX font (which I believe is Times New Roman.)
> >
> > How can I make it so the font used for the Greek letters is the
> > "Symbol" font instead?  It's important for me not to have it appear in
> > the default Times font of TeX.
> >
> There's information about changing the math font here:
>
> http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/users/mathtext.html#fonts
>
> You may be able to use "Symbol" as a custom font, but this is untested,
> as far as I know.  It would have to contain a Unicode mapping to be usable.
>
> Mike
>

Hello,

Any ideas why this piece is not showing properly?

#!/usr/bin/python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

from pylab import *

plot([1]*5)
xlabel(u'μ = 50')
ylabel(u'σ = 1.5')

show()


>
> --
> Michael Droettboom
> Science Software Branch
> Operations and Engineering Division
> Space Telescope Science Institute
> Operated by AURA for NASA
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> The Planet: dedicated and managed hosting, cloud storage, colocation
> Stay online with enterprise data centers and the best network in the
> business
> Choose flexible plans and management services without long-term contracts
> Personal 24x7 support from experience hosting pros just a phone call away.
> http://p.sf.net/sfu/theplanet-com
> _______________________________________________
> Matplotlib-users mailing list
> Matplotlib-users@...
> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/matplotlib-users
>



-- 
Gökhan

Thanks for the reminder.  Sorry this fell through the cracks.

The reason this worked for me and not for you is that I had set (and 
later forgotten) font.sans-serif to the following:

   font.sans-serif     : DejaVu Sans, Bitstream Vera Sans, Lucida 
Grande, Verdana, Geneva, Lucid, Arial, Helvetica, Avant Garde, sans-serif

DejaVu Sans is the successor to Vera Sans that includes much larger 
Unicode coverage, including the Greek characters here.  Vera Sans (at 
least the version shipped with matplotlib) does not include these 
characters.

It's an open question whether we want to ship the larger DejaVu fonts 
with matplotlib (and annoy the distro packagers even further who already 
dislike some of matplotlib's redundancy).  A less disruptive change may 
be to change the rc defaults to put DejaVu in front of Vera, even though 
we don't ship DejaVu.  This will help the majority of Linux users on 
modern distros (where DejaVu is almost always installed by default, I 
suspect), and still have our own Vera as a fallback (albeit with a more 
limited character set).  Especially since DejaVu and Vera are basically 
the same font, and substituting one for the other would not change the 
appearance of plots, I think this a reasonably safe thing to do -- but 
I'd appreciate feedback in case I haven't thought through all the issues.

Mike

Gökhan Sever wrote:
>
>
> On Fri, Jan 29, 2010 at 7:43 AM, Michael Droettboom <mdroe@... 
> <mailto:mdroe@...>> wrote:
>
>     On 01/28/2010 08:08 PM, Gökhan Sever wrote:
>
>         #!/usr/bin/python
>         # -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
>
>         from pylab import *
>
>         plot([1]*5)
>         xlabel(u'μ = 50')
>         ylabel(u'σ = 1.5')
>
>         show()
>
>     It works for me.  Can you provide a screenshot and the output from
>     matplotlib with "verbose.level : debug-annoying" in your matplotlibrc?
>
>     Mike
>
>
> Mike,
>
> Attached are the outputs. Which font do you activated in your 
> matplotlibrc? Currently non-active in mine.
>
>
> -- 
> Gökhan
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>

-- 
Michael Droettboom
Science Software Branch
Operations and Engineering Division
Space Telescope Science Institute
Operated by AURA for NASA

Thanks Mike. The Greek symbols become visible when I make the changes as you
suggested. DejaVu Sans has been installed in my system (Fedora 12). We might
put a note on the documentation stating to get wider Unicode coverage people
could install additional fonts --DejaVu Sans being one of them instead of
shipping the fonts with matplotlib.

With my working unicode example, now I have three ways to show u^-2 on
labels. See the code at:
http://code.google.com/p/ccnworks/source/browse/trunk/various/threemus.py

Not heavy Latex users like me might find unicode fonts much easier to create
their labels. Especially using units like #/cm^3.

There are so many nice looking symbols in the DejaVu Sans samples at
http://dejavu.sf.net/samples/DejaVuSans.pdf
Is it possible in matplotlib to use those symbols as replacement for regular
markers while plotting? I recall someone was asking about using Latex
symbols as markers, but not sure about the fate of his question.

Thanks

On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 10:13 AM, Michael Droettboom <mdroe@...:

> Thanks for the reminder.  Sorry this fell through the cracks.
>
> The reason this worked for me and not for you is that I had set (and later
> forgotten) font.sans-serif to the following:
>
>  font.sans-serif     : DejaVu Sans, Bitstream Vera Sans, Lucida Grande,
> Verdana, Geneva, Lucid, Arial, Helvetica, Avant Garde, sans-serif
>
> DejaVu Sans is the successor to Vera Sans that includes much larger Unicode
> coverage, including the Greek characters here.  Vera Sans (at least the
> version shipped with matplotlib) does not include these characters.
>
> It's an open question whether we want to ship the larger DejaVu fonts with
> matplotlib (and annoy the distro packagers even further who already dislike
> some of matplotlib's redundancy).  A less disruptive change may be to change
> the rc defaults to put DejaVu in front of Vera, even though we don't ship
> DejaVu.  This will help the majority of Linux users on modern distros (where
> DejaVu is almost always installed by default, I suspect), and still have our
> own Vera as a fallback (albeit with a more limited character set).
>  Especially since DejaVu and Vera are basically the same font, and
> substituting one for the other would not change the appearance of plots, I
> think this a reasonably safe thing to do -- but I'd appreciate feedback in
> case I haven't thought through all the issues.
>
> Mike
>
> Gökhan Sever wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On Fri, Jan 29, 2010 at 7:43 AM, Michael Droettboom <mdroe@...:
>> mdroe@...>> wrote:
>>
>>    On 01/28/2010 08:08 PM, Gökhan Sever wrote:
>>
>>        #!/usr/bin/python
>>        # -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
>>
>>        from pylab import *
>>
>>        plot([1]*5)
>>        xlabel(u'μ = 50')
>>        ylabel(u'σ = 1.5')
>>
>>        show()
>>
>>    It works for me.  Can you provide a screenshot and the output from
>>    matplotlib with "verbose.level : debug-annoying" in your matplotlibrc?
>>
>>    Mike
>>
>>
>> Mike,
>>
>> Attached are the outputs. Which font do you activated in your
>> matplotlibrc? Currently non-active in mine.
>>
>>
>> --
>> Gökhan
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>>
> --
> Michael Droettboom
> Science Software Branch
> Operations and Engineering Division
> Space Telescope Science Institute
> Operated by AURA for NASA
>
>


-- 
Gökhan

SVN trunk has support for mathtext as symbol markers --

  plot(range(10), linestyle='None', marker=r'$\clubsuit$')

We could support arbitrary (non-math) text, too, fairly easily.  We just 
need to invent a syntax for it.

Mike

Gökhan Sever wrote:
> Thanks Mike. The Greek symbols become visible when I make the changes 
> as you suggested. DejaVu Sans has been installed in my system (Fedora 
> 12). We might put a note on the documentation stating to get wider 
> Unicode coverage people could install additional fonts --DejaVu Sans 
> being one of them instead of shipping the fonts with matplotlib.
>
> With my working unicode example, now I have three ways to show u^-2 on 
> labels. See the code at: 
> http://code.google.com/p/ccnworks/source/browse/trunk/various/threemus.py
>
> Not heavy Latex users like me might find unicode fonts much easier to 
> create their labels. Especially using units like #/cm^3.
>
> There are so many nice looking symbols in the DejaVu Sans samples at 
> http://dejavu.sf.net/samples/DejaVuSans.pdf
> Is it possible in matplotlib to use those symbols as replacement for 
> regular markers while plotting? I recall someone was asking about 
> using Latex symbols as markers, but not sure about the fate of his 
> question.
>
> Thanks
>
> On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 10:13 AM, Michael Droettboom <mdroe@... 
> <mailto:mdroe@...>> wrote:
>
>     Thanks for the reminder.  Sorry this fell through the cracks.
>
>     The reason this worked for me and not for you is that I had set
>     (and later forgotten) font.sans-serif to the following:
>
>      font.sans-serif     : DejaVu Sans, Bitstream Vera Sans, Lucida
>     Grande, Verdana, Geneva, Lucid, Arial, Helvetica, Avant Garde,
>     sans-serif
>
>     DejaVu Sans is the successor to Vera Sans that includes much
>     larger Unicode coverage, including the Greek characters here.
>      Vera Sans (at least the version shipped with matplotlib) does not
>     include these characters.
>
>     It's an open question whether we want to ship the larger DejaVu
>     fonts with matplotlib (and annoy the distro packagers even further
>     who already dislike some of matplotlib's redundancy).  A less
>     disruptive change may be to change the rc defaults to put DejaVu
>     in front of Vera, even though we don't ship DejaVu.  This will
>     help the majority of Linux users on modern distros (where DejaVu
>     is almost always installed by default, I suspect), and still have
>     our own Vera as a fallback (albeit with a more limited character
>     set).  Especially since DejaVu and Vera are basically the same
>     font, and substituting one for the other would not change the
>     appearance of plots, I think this a reasonably safe thing to do --
>     but I'd appreciate feedback in case I haven't thought through all
>     the issues.
>
>     Mike
>
>     Gökhan Sever wrote:
>
>
>
>         On Fri, Jan 29, 2010 at 7:43 AM, Michael Droettboom
>         <mdroe@... <mailto:mdroe@...>
>         <mailto:mdroe@... <mailto:mdroe@...>>> wrote:
>
>            On 01/28/2010 08:08 PM, Gökhan Sever wrote:
>
>                #!/usr/bin/python
>                # -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
>
>                from pylab import *
>
>                plot([1]*5)
>                xlabel(u'μ = 50')
>                ylabel(u'σ = 1.5')
>
>                show()
>
>            It works for me.  Can you provide a screenshot and the
>         output from
>            matplotlib with "verbose.level : debug-annoying" in your
>         matplotlibrc?
>
>            Mike
>
>
>         Mike,
>
>         Attached are the outputs. Which font do you activated in your
>         matplotlibrc? Currently non-active in mine.
>
>
>         -- 
>         Gökhan
>         ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
>     -- 
>     Michael Droettboom
>     Science Software Branch
>     Operations and Engineering Division
>     Space Telescope Science Institute
>     Operated by AURA for NASA
>
>
>
>
> -- 
> Gökhan

-- 
Michael Droettboom
Science Software Branch
Operations and Engineering Division
Space Telescope Science Institute
Operated by AURA for NASA

Thanks again. I didn't know it was complete :)

For the second idea you mean something as generic as plotting such markers?

plt.plot(range(10), linestyle='None', marker=u'※ ')



On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 2:56 PM, Michael Droettboom <mdroe@...> wrote:

> SVN trunk has support for mathtext as symbol markers --
>
>  plot(range(10), linestyle='None', marker=r'$\clubsuit$')
>
> We could support arbitrary (non-math) text, too, fairly easily.  We just
> need to invent a syntax for it.
>
> Mike
>
> Gökhan Sever wrote:
>
>> Thanks Mike. The Greek symbols become visible when I make the changes as
>> you suggested. DejaVu Sans has been installed in my system (Fedora 12). We
>> might put a note on the documentation stating to get wider Unicode coverage
>> people could install additional fonts --DejaVu Sans being one of them
>> instead of shipping the fonts with matplotlib.
>>
>> With my working unicode example, now I have three ways to show u^-2 on
>> labels. See the code at:
>> http://code.google.com/p/ccnworks/source/browse/trunk/various/threemus.py
>>
>> Not heavy Latex users like me might find unicode fonts much easier to
>> create their labels. Especially using units like #/cm^3.
>>
>> There are so many nice looking symbols in the DejaVu Sans samples at
>> http://dejavu.sf.net/samples/DejaVuSans.pdf
>> Is it possible in matplotlib to use those symbols as replacement for
>> regular markers while plotting? I recall someone was asking about using
>> Latex symbols as markers, but not sure about the fate of his question.
>>
>> Thanks
>>
>> On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 10:13 AM, Michael Droettboom <mdroe@...:
>> mdroe@...>> wrote:
>>
>>    Thanks for the reminder.  Sorry this fell through the cracks.
>>
>>    The reason this worked for me and not for you is that I had set
>>    (and later forgotten) font.sans-serif to the following:
>>
>>     font.sans-serif     : DejaVu Sans, Bitstream Vera Sans, Lucida
>>    Grande, Verdana, Geneva, Lucid, Arial, Helvetica, Avant Garde,
>>    sans-serif
>>
>>    DejaVu Sans is the successor to Vera Sans that includes much
>>    larger Unicode coverage, including the Greek characters here.
>>     Vera Sans (at least the version shipped with matplotlib) does not
>>    include these characters.
>>
>>    It's an open question whether we want to ship the larger DejaVu
>>    fonts with matplotlib (and annoy the distro packagers even further
>>    who already dislike some of matplotlib's redundancy).  A less
>>    disruptive change may be to change the rc defaults to put DejaVu
>>    in front of Vera, even though we don't ship DejaVu.  This will
>>    help the majority of Linux users on modern distros (where DejaVu
>>    is almost always installed by default, I suspect), and still have
>>    our own Vera as a fallback (albeit with a more limited character
>>    set).  Especially since DejaVu and Vera are basically the same
>>    font, and substituting one for the other would not change the
>>    appearance of plots, I think this a reasonably safe thing to do --
>>    but I'd appreciate feedback in case I haven't thought through all
>>    the issues.
>>
>>    Mike
>>
>>    Gökhan Sever wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>        On Fri, Jan 29, 2010 at 7:43 AM, Michael Droettboom
>>        <mdroe@... <mailto:mdroe@...>
>>        <mailto:mdroe@... <mailto:mdroe@...>>> wrote:
>>
>>           On 01/28/2010 08:08 PM, Gökhan Sever wrote:
>>
>>               #!/usr/bin/python
>>               # -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
>>
>>               from pylab import *
>>
>>               plot([1]*5)
>>               xlabel(u'μ = 50')
>>               ylabel(u'σ = 1.5')
>>
>>               show()
>>
>>           It works for me.  Can you provide a screenshot and the
>>        output from
>>           matplotlib with "verbose.level : debug-annoying" in your
>>        matplotlibrc?
>>
>>           Mike
>>
>>
>>        Mike,
>>
>>        Attached are the outputs. Which font do you activated in your
>>        matplotlibrc? Currently non-active in mine.
>>
>>
>>        --        Gökhan
>>
>>  ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>>
>>    --    Michael Droettboom
>>    Science Software Branch
>>    Operations and Engineering Division
>>    Space Telescope Science Institute
>>    Operated by AURA for NASA
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Gökhan
>>
>
> --
> Michael Droettboom
> Science Software Branch
> Operations and Engineering Division
> Space Telescope Science Institute
> Operated by AURA for NASA
>
>


-- 
Gökhan

Gökhan Sever wrote:
> Thanks again. I didn't know it was complete :)
>
> For the second idea you mean something as generic as plotting such 
> markers?
>
> plt.plot(range(10), linestyle='None', marker=u'※ ')
Yes -- but it can't be quite this simple, since there is already a set 
of strings that have specific meanings for markers, and we wouldn't want 
to change that behavior.  In order to use an arbitrary character or 
string, we'd need additional syntax to indicate that's what you want to 
do.  For example:

plt.plot(range(10), linestyle='None', marker=u'(※)')

But I'm hoping someone can suggest a more obvious way to do it.

Mike
>
>
>
> On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 2:56 PM, Michael Droettboom <mdroe@... 
> <mailto:mdroe@...>> wrote:
>
>     SVN trunk has support for mathtext as symbol markers --
>
>      plot(range(10), linestyle='None', marker=r'$\clubsuit$')
>
>     We could support arbitrary (non-math) text, too, fairly easily.
>      We just need to invent a syntax for it.
>
>     Mike
>
>     Gökhan Sever wrote:
>
>         Thanks Mike. The Greek symbols become visible when I make the
>         changes as you suggested. DejaVu Sans has been installed in my
>         system (Fedora 12). We might put a note on the documentation
>         stating to get wider Unicode coverage people could install
>         additional fonts --DejaVu Sans being one of them instead of
>         shipping the fonts with matplotlib.
>
>         With my working unicode example, now I have three ways to show
>         u^-2 on labels. See the code at:
>         http://code.google.com/p/ccnworks/source/browse/trunk/various/threemus.py
>
>         Not heavy Latex users like me might find unicode fonts much
>         easier to create their labels. Especially using units like #/cm^3.
>
>         There are so many nice looking symbols in the DejaVu Sans
>         samples at http://dejavu.sf.net/samples/DejaVuSans.pdf
>         Is it possible in matplotlib to use those symbols as
>         replacement for regular markers while plotting? I recall
>         someone was asking about using Latex symbols as markers, but
>         not sure about the fate of his question.
>
>         Thanks
>
>         On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 10:13 AM, Michael Droettboom
>         <mdroe@... <mailto:mdroe@...>
>         <mailto:mdroe@... <mailto:mdroe@...>>> wrote:
>
>            Thanks for the reminder.  Sorry this fell through the cracks.
>
>            The reason this worked for me and not for you is that I had set
>            (and later forgotten) font.sans-serif to the following:
>
>             font.sans-serif     : DejaVu Sans, Bitstream Vera Sans, Lucida
>            Grande, Verdana, Geneva, Lucid, Arial, Helvetica, Avant Garde,
>            sans-serif
>
>            DejaVu Sans is the successor to Vera Sans that includes much
>            larger Unicode coverage, including the Greek characters here.
>             Vera Sans (at least the version shipped with matplotlib)
>         does not
>            include these characters.
>
>            It's an open question whether we want to ship the larger DejaVu
>            fonts with matplotlib (and annoy the distro packagers even
>         further
>            who already dislike some of matplotlib's redundancy).  A less
>            disruptive change may be to change the rc defaults to put
>         DejaVu
>            in front of Vera, even though we don't ship DejaVu.  This will
>            help the majority of Linux users on modern distros (where
>         DejaVu
>            is almost always installed by default, I suspect), and
>         still have
>            our own Vera as a fallback (albeit with a more limited
>         character
>            set).  Especially since DejaVu and Vera are basically the same
>            font, and substituting one for the other would not change the
>            appearance of plots, I think this a reasonably safe thing
>         to do --
>            but I'd appreciate feedback in case I haven't thought
>         through all
>            the issues.
>
>            Mike
>
>            Gökhan Sever wrote:
>
>
>
>                On Fri, Jan 29, 2010 at 7:43 AM, Michael Droettboom
>                <mdroe@... <mailto:mdroe@...>
>         <mailto:mdroe@... <mailto:mdroe@...>>
>                <mailto:mdroe@... <mailto:mdroe@...>
>         <mailto:mdroe@... <mailto:mdroe@...>>>> wrote:
>
>                   On 01/28/2010 08:08 PM, Gökhan Sever wrote:
>
>                       #!/usr/bin/python
>                       # -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
>
>                       from pylab import *
>
>                       plot([1]*5)
>                       xlabel(u'μ = 50')
>                       ylabel(u'σ = 1.5')
>
>                       show()
>
>                   It works for me.  Can you provide a screenshot and the
>                output from
>                   matplotlib with "verbose.level : debug-annoying" in your
>                matplotlibrc?
>
>                   Mike
>
>
>                Mike,
>
>                Attached are the outputs. Which font do you activated
>         in your
>                matplotlibrc? Currently non-active in mine.
>
>
>                --        Gökhan
>              
>          ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
>            --    Michael Droettboom
>            Science Software Branch
>            Operations and Engineering Division
>            Space Telescope Science Institute
>            Operated by AURA for NASA
>
>
>
>
>         -- 
>         Gökhan
>
>
>     -- 
>     Michael Droettboom
>     Science Software Branch
>     Operations and Engineering Division
>     Space Telescope Science Institute
>     Operated by AURA for NASA
>
>
>
>
> -- 
> Gökhan

-- 
Michael Droettboom
Science Software Branch
Operations and Engineering Division
Space Telescope Science Institute
Operated by AURA for NASA

>  Gökhan Sever wrote:
> > For the second idea you mean something as generic as plotting such
> > markers?
> > plt.plot(range(10), linestyle='None', marker=u'※ ')


On 3/1/2010 8:33 AM, Michael Droettboom wrote:
>  Yes -- but it can't be quite this simple, since there is already a set
>  of strings that have specific meanings for markers, and we wouldn't want
>  to change that behavior.  In order to use an arbitrary character or
>  string, we'd need additional syntax to indicate that's what you want to
>  do.


Perhaps naively, I do not see why.
A small number of strings have predefined meanings.
Just keep documenting that and then test if the
provided string is in this set.
Otherwise, use the provided string.
This seems very nice.

If that is too implicit, then adding a markerstr keyword argument
seems the right way to go. It would override the marker argument,
and any string could be used, getting rid of the above problem.

Cheers,
Alan Isaac
(just a user)

Alan G Isaac wrote:
>>  Gökhan Sever wrote:
>>     
>>> For the second idea you mean something as generic as plotting such
>>> markers?
>>> plt.plot(range(10), linestyle='None', marker=u'※ ')
>>>       
>
>
> On 3/1/2010 8:33 AM, Michael Droettboom wrote:
>   
>>  Yes -- but it can't be quite this simple, since there is already a set
>>  of strings that have specific meanings for markers, and we wouldn't want
>>  to change that behavior.  In order to use an arbitrary character or
>>  string, we'd need additional syntax to indicate that's what you want to
>>  do.
>>     
>
>
> Perhaps naively, I do not see why.
> A small number of strings have predefined meanings.
> Just keep documenting that and then test if the
> provided string is in this set.
> Otherwise, use the provided string.
> This seems very nice.
>
> If that is too implicit, then adding a markerstr keyword argument
> seems the right way to go. It would override the marker argument,
> and any string could be used, getting rid of the above problem.
>
> Cheers,
> Alan Isaac
> (just a user)
>   
What if you want to use the letter 'o' as a marker?  That to me seems 
like a potential source of confusion, as well as a little bit limiting.  
What would the escaping syntax be to use the letter 'o'?

As you suggest, adding an additional kwarg is also a way forward.  In 
that case, though, I would suggest that providing both a marker and 
markerstr argument should raise an exception.  Having implicit 
overriding rules can often lead to confusion.

One downside of the additional kwarg is that you occasionally see code 
like this:

markers = ['o', '.', 'h', 'x']
for data, marker in zip(datasets, markers):
    plot(data, marker=marker)

If one wanted to mix built-in with non-built-in markers that idiom would 
become much more complex.  That's why I proposed sticking to a purely 
string representation -- I'm just not sure of the best or most obvious one.

Mike

-- 
Michael Droettboom
Science Software Branch
Operations and Engineering Division
Space Telescope Science Institute
Operated by AURA for NASA

On 3/1/2010 9:36 AM, Michael Droettboom wrote:
>  What if you want to use the letter 'o' as a marker?  That to me seems 
like a potential source of confusion, as well as a little bit limiting.  
What would the escaping syntax be to use the letter 'o'?

Maybe:
allow only unicode strings as string markers
and test with `is`::

 >>> 'o' is 'o'
         True
 >>> 'o' is u'o'
         False

Alan Isaac

On Mon, Mar 1, 2010 at 8:36 AM, Michael Droettboom <mdroe@...> wrote:

> Alan G Isaac wrote:
> >>  Gökhan Sever wrote:
> >>
> >>> For the second idea you mean something as generic as plotting such
> >>> markers?
> >>> plt.plot(range(10), linestyle='None', marker=u'※ ')
> >>>
> >
> >
> > On 3/1/2010 8:33 AM, Michael Droettboom wrote:
> >
> >>  Yes -- but it can't be quite this simple, since there is already a set
> >>  of strings that have specific meanings for markers, and we wouldn't
> want
> >>  to change that behavior.  In order to use an arbitrary character or
> >>  string, we'd need additional syntax to indicate that's what you want to
> >>  do.
> >>
> >
> >
> > Perhaps naively, I do not see why.
> > A small number of strings have predefined meanings.
> > Just keep documenting that and then test if the
> > provided string is in this set.
> > Otherwise, use the provided string.
> > This seems very nice.
> >
> > If that is too implicit, then adding a markerstr keyword argument
> > seems the right way to go. It would override the marker argument,
> > and any string could be used, getting rid of the above problem.
> >
> > Cheers,
> > Alan Isaac
> > (just a user)
> >
> What if you want to use the letter 'o' as a marker?  That to me seems
> like a potential source of confusion, as well as a little bit limiting.
> What would the escaping syntax be to use the letter 'o'?
>
> As you suggest, adding an additional kwarg is also a way forward.  In
> that case, though, I would suggest that providing both a marker and
> markerstr argument should raise an exception.  Having implicit
> overriding rules can often lead to confusion.
>
> One downside of the additional kwarg is that you occasionally see code
> like this:
>
> markers = ['o', '.', 'h', 'x']
> for data, marker in zip(datasets, markers):
>    plot(data, marker=marker)
>
> If one wanted to mix built-in with non-built-in markers that idiom would
> become much more complex.  That's why I proposed sticking to a purely
> string representation -- I'm just not sure of the best or most obvious one.
>

To me it seems like having only one keyword "marker" is easier for the sake
of simplicity as you have already demonstrated with an example. (Having one
keyword to handle all special markers, unicode symbols and strings.) However
probably this will need more coding to handle all the cases properly.


>
> Mike
>
> --
> Michael Droettboom
> Science Software Branch
> Operations and Engineering Division
> Space Telescope Science Institute
> Operated by AURA for NASA
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Download Intel&#174; Parallel Studio Eval
> Try the new software tools for yourself. Speed compiling, find bugs
> proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance.
> See why Intel Parallel Studio got high marks during beta.
> http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-sw-dev
> _______________________________________________
> Matplotlib-users mailing list
> Matplotlib-users@...
> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/matplotlib-users
>



-- 
Gökhan