Re: [matplotlib-devel] Visio backend

[HamletG <ha...@ha...>]

Hi,

First, my apologies for being pretty rude by storming in the mailing 
list without even introducing myself ;-) and by doing so now, it will 
answer partly your questions on my intentions concerning the Visio 
backend. I'm a researcher in the Nokia Research center (yeah, the mobile 
phone thing) and I'm currently working for a standardization alliance. 
There, I lead the modeling of a quite complex network-like system. One 
very important goal is to have a platform independent simulation engine, 
which means that the library used to visualize the simulation results 
has to be platform independent too. Since many companies are involved, 
it's pretty important to be tool agnostic: in practice it means we try 
to reuse open source software as much as possible. So I searched quite 
some time to find an appropriate library for us and matplotlib was by 
far the best I could find given our requirements. Specially so that I 
have scripted a big part of the simulation engine (written in C++) by 
using python, so perfect match ;-)

Since standardization means also writing specifications, documents, 
reports, etc. and the tools we use are Microsoft based, Visio is the de 
facto tool for all drawings, schema, graphics, etc. put in the 
specification or any other documents. So in fact, Visio can do much more 
than just flowcharts: it's equivalent in Unix world would be something 
like Dia I think. In this standardization context, I need to have a 
fully featured backend and in a very short time even: I can't afford to 
wait 6 months to have it done. 

I completely understand your point about having a high threshold when 
talking of bringing in yet another backend ;-): it's a good and healthy 
attitude to keep the quality of the package high. And indeed, the visio 
backend supports aligned rotated text (even if I still have a small bug 
to correct). But I have to admit that I didn't think about the mathtext 
so far, I have to look if it's possible at all to support it and how it 
could be done. For the support of images, it doesn't support it yet, but 
it shouldn't be a problem. I don't know what you mean by "collections" 
... sorry. I'm pretty new to matplotlib and don't know all the goodies yet.

My idea to judge the "maturity" of the backend is pretty simple: I will 
take all the examples you have made for matplotlib and see how many the 
backend can correctly draw in Visio. Based on this, decision can be made 
to include it in the "main stream" of matplotlib or leave it as an 
offspring. Both solutions are fine by me. So my conclusion is to say 
that I will continue the development of the Visio backend as an 
offspring. If later people agrees that it adds a value to bring the 
Visio backend in the main distribution of matplotlib, I will be happy to 
do just that.

BR,
Michel

John Hunter wrote:
>>>>>> "HamletG" == HamletG  <ha...@ha...> writes:
>>>>>>             
>
>     HamletG> Hi, It doesn't seem that there is much interest in a
>     HamletG> Visio backend ;-) I saw John saying that the list of
>     HamletG> contributors was already huge, etc. so I put up my own
>     HamletG> "local" version of matplotlib, so I can continue easily
>     HamletG> working on the Visio backend.
>
>     HamletG> If you are curious about the progress, you can have a
>     HamletG> look at http://www.hamletg.org/wiki/index.php/Matplotlib
>
> Sorry for the silence on this -- I confess I had never heard of Visio
> before your earlier post and did a little looking on the microsoft web
> site.  It looked to me more like a flow chart application than a
> graphing tool -- is that correct?
>
> It is not an issue of a list of contributors -- I would love to have a
> huge list -- it is more an issue of a proliferation of backends.  We
> have too many, and most are incomplete, so my threshold is getting
> higher for what I would like to see in the main distribution, because
> often what happens is a developer adds just the features they need and
> leave it at that and we have backends that are only partially
> functional and poorly maintained.  I prefer to see a few core backends
> that target the most popular GUIs and image formats.  Does you backend
> support properly aligned rotated text, mathtext, images, collections
> or images?  These are the features most people leave out because they
> are harder to implement.  When we want to make any change to the
> backend API we have to port these to all the backends and it is
> usually me or one of a couple of developers to do this since the
> original developer may have moved on.
>
> That said, I would always be happy to include a (mostly) full featured
> backend for a format a large number of users want.  Short of that, I
> think distributing it through another channel, or making a sandbox in
> the mpl distribution, with pointers to the source on the website will
> suffice.  If you'd like to send a blurb for the website pointing to
> your code I'll include it, or if you think given the above that the
> Visio backend should be in the main distribution I'm happy to hear the
> argument.  I don't use Windows so I am not really in tune with that
> side of the development world, and am happy to be educated.
>
> JDH
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