Re: [matplotlib-devel] Mathtext improvements (merging into trunk)

[Fernando P. <fpe...@gm...>]

[ That was meant for the list, sorry ]

On 7/26/07, John Hunter <jd...@gm...> wrote:

> I'm on the fence as to how to handle this case.  The majority of our
> users will think of $ as the US currency symbol, and will have never
> heard of TeX.   Option 1 is to educate them, and require them to \$
> quote that symbol.  Option 2 is to enable a text property eg mathtext,
> and do
>
> text(x, y, 'what is the $\sin(x)$', mathtext=True)
>
> Option 3 is to try and be clever, and interpret an even number of
> unquoted dollar symbols as mathtext, or any string that has a quoted
> dollar sign symbol as mathtext, else assume plain text.  Option 4 is
> to treat *all* strings as mathtext, but I think we would pay a pretty
> big performance hit to invoke the mathtext machinery for every piece
> of text.  But it is an option.  In option 4, of course, users would be
> required to quote all dollar signs, so it is related to option 1 but
> slightly different in how it treats strings with no dollar signs.
>
> I'm not too keen on the text(x, y, Math('string')) proposal, which is
> a little outside the normal matplotlib approach.
>
> Michael, do you have a preference or an alternate proposal?

I'm not Michael, but I s'pose I can still speak :)

This sounds to me like a good case for Guido's mantra of NOT putting
keywords in functions and instead just making two separate functions.
Why not just

text(x,y,"This year I lost a lot of $$$")
mtext(x,y,r"This year I lost \$$\infty$")

?  Explicit is better than implicit and all that...

cheers,

f