Re: [matplotlib-devel] MEP9: interactivity

[Drain, T. R (343P) <the...@jp...>]

OK - I'll start the ball rolling...



One feature that would be nice to have is positioning options that are not pixel based.  See the annotate function for some possibilities:



http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/api/pyplot_api.html#matplotlib.pyplot.annotate



I'm not sure if all of these options are practical for a general artist but they do come in handy.  Being able to position something as a percentage of the figure or an axes is a really nice feature when making nice looking plots.  This is especially true for text.  We implemented something for dragging annotations around and saving the results (in a custom xml file) that kept the initial method the user used (%, data, pixel) with the updated location.  We didn't implement a resizing capability but that would have been great to have for each axes object in the figure.



FYI the app we made used MPL and basemap to display the landing uncertainties and hazard probabilities for the Mars Curiosity rover on the Martian surface (very cool stuff). There was a lot of data and labels on the graphs and the navigation team needed to quickly make presentation grade images that people could easily read.  Being able to drag the annotations, legend, etc around was huge and since data was updated every day, being able to save the drag and drop locations and restore them from the xml file with new data the next day made things a lot faster.



Ted



________________________________
From: Daniel Hyams [dh...@gm...]
Sent: Wednesday, August 15, 2012 11:10 AM
To: mat...@li...
Subject: [matplotlib-devel] MEP9: interactivity

I'm not sure where to say that I just posted up a new MEP, but here it is:

https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/wiki/MEP9


and I suppose we discuss it here...

--
Daniel Hyams
dh...@gm...<mailto:dh...@gm...>