[Matplotlib-announce] ANN: matplotlib-0.72

[John H. <jdh...@ac...>]

matplotlib-0.72 is up at the sourceforge site.  Note that there have
been some signficant changes at the extension code level.  If you get
crashes or segfaults on import or usage, try deleting the "build"
subsirectory and site-packages/matplotlib before reinstalling to
insure a clean install.


  - heavy optimizations in line marker drawing eg plot(x,y,'+') or any
    other line marker.  Here are some numbers, where N is the number
    of symbols
    

                       0.71     0.72    speedup
           -----------------------------------
        N =   1000 |  0.24s  |  0.13s |  1.85x
        N =   5000 |  0.68s  |  0.19s |  3.57x
        N =  10000 |  1.17s  |  0.28s |  4.19x
        N =  50000 |  5.30s  |  0.60s |  8.89x
        N = 100000 | 10.02s  |  0.70s | 14.31x
        N = 500000 | 48.81s  |  2.32s | 21.03x


 - lots of work making log plots "just work".  You can toggle log y
   axes with the 'l' command -- nonpositive data are simply ignored
   and no longer raise exceptions.  log plots should be a lot faster
   and more robust

 - fixed a contour bug for unequal sized arrays and made the syntax
   matlab compatible -- see http://matplotlib.sf.net/API_CHANGES

 - alpha version of QTAgg backend -- note the licensing issue of QT is
   murky since QT is dual licensed.  If you are shipping a commercial
   product with matplotlib you may want to remove the qt backend to be
   on the safe side.

 - matshow for displaying arrays with proper aspect ratio -- see
   http://matplotlib.sf.net/matplotlib.pylab.html#-mathshow

 - new examples/interactive.py which shows you how to use matplotlib
   in a custom gtk shell

 - shared axes for two scale and ganged plots -- you can set sharex on
   and axis and multiple subpolots will pan and zoom together.  See
   http://matplotlib.sf.net/examples/shared_axis_demo.py - Thanks Baptiste!

 - Default key presses over axes: 'g' toggles grid, 'l' toggles logy

 - little features: calls to subplot with overlap other subplots now
   delete the overlapped subplot, load and save work with file and
   handles gzipped files transaparently, small PS optimizations, gtk
   figure resizing more flexible

 - little bug fixes: contour datalim and unequal sized array bugs,
   mx2num, added missing mathtext symbols, fonts in mathtext
   super/subscripts, contour works with interactive changes in cmaps,
   clim

Special thanks to Fernando Perez for many CVS bug reports, feature
suggestions and contributions.

http://matplotlib.sf.net

JDH