Re: [Matplotlib-users] display GUI scientific notation

[Darren D. <dd...@co...>]

On Wednesday 21 February 2007 2:45:25 am Eric Firing wrote:
> Matthew Auger wrote:
> > Ah...right. That works well enough (I believe that I originally had
> > editted backend_bases to circumvent the format_coord call--clearly not
> > the best solution)! I don't know of a good reason to *not* use the axis
> > formatting, but perhaps an rcparam could control this?
>
> I don't know what the historical reason for the present default is, but
> one candidate is speed: the coordinate numbers get reformatted and
> printed at a great rate as the cursor moves across a plot, so one might
> not want to have the formatting done by a big chunk of python code.
> format_data_short will typically be faster than format_data.

Here is the reason format_data_short was added: the x,y coordinates of the 
cursor used to be printed to 10 digits, something I added when I was working 
out the offset ticklabels for the x and y axis. These coordinates, when 
rendered into the toolbar, were causing the figure window to resize to make 
room for the numbers in the toolbar. format_data is also used to format the 
ticklabels, so John suggested the new method. At the time, we needed a quick 
work around. Maybe it's time to give it another look, and see if there is a 
better long-term solution.

Darren