Re: [matplotlib-devel] switching rc files (and discussion of styles)

[Tony Yu <ts...@gm...>]

On Fri, May 11, 2012 at 4:20 PM, Benjamin Root <ben...@ou...> wrote:

>
>
> On Fri, May 11, 2012 at 4:17 PM, Paul Ivanov <piv...@gm...> wrote:
>
>> Hey everyone,
>>
>> I wanted to highlight Matthew Emmett's (memmett) PR in progress [1] that
>> brings the ability to switch between rcParams.
>>
>> Matthew's implementation started with just being able to read in and use
>> an rcParam file, and I suggested the idea of having a context manager,
>> that would allow you to do something like:
>>
>>  with rc_context(fname):
>>      plt.plot()
>>      ...
>>
>> and have the rcParams restored outside of the context.
>>
>> I know there have been a few threads (can't find links now for some
>> reason) and in-person discussions in the past about having this kind of
>> ability in matplotlib, and having an idea of "styles", and Tony Yu
>> implemented a variant of this on top of matplotlib in mpltools [2], but
>> I wanted to ping the list here for other ideas and feelings about such
>> functionality (if anyone can find pointers to previous discussions, that
>> would be very welcome).
>>
>> 1. https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/pull/861
>> 2. https://github.com/tonysyu/mpltools
>>
>> best,
>> --
>> Paul Ivanov
>> 314 address only used for lists,  off-list direct email at:
>> http://pirsquared.org | GPG/PGP key id: 0x0F3E28F7
>>
>>
> Such a feature would clean up the test code considerably.
>
> Ben Root
>
>
Thanks for pinging me on the PR, Paul. Both the original PR and the
addition of the context manager are great ideas.

Just to clarify, what I implemented in mpltools was a sort-of stylesheet
that can be easily accessed (i.e. you don't have to remember the path, just
the name; and if you forget that, it's listed in a module attribute). But,
I ended up using ConfigObj to parse the rc file instead of using
matplotlib's parser. One major disadvantage of that approach is that
ConfigObj uses a different syntax than matplotlib's rc parameters. In this
sense, the PR would help greatly to fix this discrepancy.

Unfortunately, the PR doesn't completely fulfill my needs. I wanted to
allow multiple stylesheets to be declared in a single file; this means I'd
need to plug into the loop that iterates over the lines of the file. I can
push in that direction on the PR, but I don't want to do that unless people
think this would be more-generally useful.

-Tony