Re: [matplotlib-devel] Transparent backgrounds for savefig

[John H. <jd...@gm...>]

On Wed, Jun 25, 2008 at 8:25 AM, Stéfan van der Walt <st...@su...> wrote:
> 2008/6/25 Michael Droettboom <md...@st...>:
>> Maybe this should be made an option on the "transparent" kwarg to savefig,
>> something like:
>>
>>  transparent = 'figure' | 'figure_and_axes'
>>
>> Or is that just making things too complicated?
>
> Those options would both be very handy.

Stefan -- just for a little background.  The figure has a
matplotlib.patches.Rectangle instance called "figurePatch" and the
axes has a Rectangle instance called axesPatch.  You can set any
property on them directly (facecolor, edgecolor, linewidth, linestyle,
alpha).  Eg,

  fig = plt.figure()
  fig.figurePatch.set_alpha(0.5)
  ax = fig.add_subplot(111)
  ax.axesPatch.set_alpha(0.5)

Michael's transparent kwarg is just a helper function to do this
automatically at save time w/o affecting the screen rendered figure.
For stylistic reasons, I'd like a new name for figurePatch and
rectanglePatch.  "background", "rectangle" and "patch" would all be
nicer.  I'm inclined toward "rectangle" -- I think I'll just put an
alias in Figure and Axes unless someone has a better idea.

JDH