Re: [matplotlib-devel] future of mpl documentation

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

On Thursday 22 May 2008 01:23:53 pm Michael Droettboom wrote:
> Just something to keep in mind: many of the docstrings are pieced
> together at import time (to avoid rewriting descriptions of common
> parameters).  Any tool that extracts docstrings by parsing Python rather
> than importing Python may choke on that approach.

Yes, that might have been a big problem, but it looks like Sphinx does the 
right thing. axes.Axes.plot includes the following in its docstring:

        The kwargs are Line2D properties:
        %(Line2D)s

And the rendering at 
http://dale.chess.cornell.edu/~darren/temp/matplotlib/mpl_api.xml#matplotlib-axes
is what we would want (although the formatting in html is missing some 
newlines):

The kwargs are Line2D properties:

    alpha: float
    animated: [True | False]
    antialiased or aa: [True | False]
    axes: unknown
    clip_box: a matplotlib.transform.Bbox instance
    clip_on: [True | False]
    clip_path: a Path instance and a Transform instance, a Patch
    color or c: any matplotlib color
    contains: unknown
    dash_capstyle: [‘butt’ | ‘round’ | ‘projecting’]
    dash_joinstyle: [‘miter’ | ‘round’ | ‘bevel’]
    dashes: sequence of on/off ink in points
    data: (np.array xdata, np.array ydata)
    figure: a matplotlib.figure.Figure instance
    label: any string
    linestyle or ls: 
[ ‘-‘ | ‘–’ | ‘-.’ | ‘:’ | ‘steps’ | ‘steps-pre’ | ‘steps-mid’ | ‘steps-post’ | ‘None’ | ‘ ‘ | ‘’ ]
    linewidth or lw: float value in points
    lod: [True | False]
    marker: [ ‘+’ | ‘,’ | ‘.’ | ‘1’ | ‘2’ | ‘3’ | ‘4’
    markeredgecolor or mec: any matplotlib color
    markeredgewidth or mew: float value in points
    markerfacecolor or mfc: any matplotlib color
    markersize or ms: float
    picker: unknown
    pickradius: unknown
    solid_capstyle: [‘butt’ | ‘round’ |  ‘projecting’]
    solid_joinstyle: [‘miter’ | ‘round’ | ‘bevel’]
    transform: a matplotlib.transforms.Transform instance
    visible: [True | False]
    xdata: np.array
    ydata: np.array
    zorder: any number