Re: [matplotlib-devel] legend class with paddings in canvas unit

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

On Thu, Oct 30, 2008 at 2:59 AM, Jae-Joon Lee <lee...@gm...> wrote:
> Basic idea is to create a new version of the Legend class with a same
> interface to the current one.
> Eric's original suggestion was to use some optional kwarg to choose the version.
> But I found this approach does not work well unless we also set the
> meaningful default values in the rc file. For example, the current
> "legend.axespad" in rcsetup.py is 0.02 which is in axes unit. But this
> need to be ~10 (if given in points) or ~0.5 (if given in fraction of
> the font size) in the new class.

I think we should deprectate the axes pad kwarg. If you see it coming
in (not None), make a reasonable points approximation to a pad using
the figure dimensions and axes dimensions and dpi, and issue a warning

    padpoints = # compute something here from figsize, axes rect and axespad
    warnings.warn("axespad is a deprecated argument to legend.  The
new argument is "padpoints" and is in points.  Assuming %1.1f
ponts"%padpoints)

That way we won't go crazy supporting 2 versions of something, users'
code won't break initially or fail silently, nd users will have a
clear migration path.

Does that work?  Anyone who is using axespad is something of a power
user and will have no problem fixing up their code.

JDH