Re: [matplotlib-devel] File format for plots

[sam t. <sam...@ya...>]

Troels Kofoed Jacobsen wrote:
> On Wednesday 25 February 2009 09:35:07 am sam tygier wrote:
>> I think this topic has come up before, but i don't think anything has
>> resulted from it.
>>
>> I'd like a way for saving a plot from from matplotlib, so that it can be
>> re-rendered later, possibly with a different backend, maybe to a different
>> size, and maybe with changes to the labels. This would save me having to
>> rerun the simulation that generated the plot.
> 
> I think this is a good idea, but why don't you just save your data to a file 
> and plot from a different script. If the data is only numbers you can just do 
> savetxt('data.dat',data) in you simulation script and then 
> data=loadtxt('data.dat') from your plot script...
> Now if you also just use savefig('fig') without suffix, you can just run your 
> plot script like: python plot.py -DAgg or -DPS or whatever and it will plot to 
> the default format for that backend.
> 
> Best regards
> Troels Kofoed Jacobsen

That is one method that i have used, but i don't think it is ideal. My data can be a wide range of things, sometimes the coordinates of a bunch of many particles, sometimes the track of one. If I save just an array of numbers it can get a bit confusing. So it would be useful to be able to save everything needed to make the plot.

Sam Tygier