Re: [matplotlib-devel] Colored lines and examples / documentation

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

Hi David,

Sorry for the delay in replying. It was good meeting you last week.
Comments inline with a lot of parts cut out.


On Thu, Jul 4, 2013 at 10:13 PM, David P. Sanders <dps...@gm...>wrote:
>
> I have been working, as a first step, on colored line support. This is
> not, of course, new -- it's all in LineCollection. However, as a user,
> LineCollection is intimidating and difficult to understand, and does not
> lead to easy experimentation (I speak from experience).
>

I agree that LineCollection isn't the most user-friendly thing to use.
Personally, I'd be in favor of something like your `linecolor` suggestion,
but I'd understand if the core-devs have concerns about feature creep.


> At Tony's suggestion, the first step was to rewrite the
> multicolored_line.py example.
> You can find my first attempt as an IPython notebook at
>
>
> https://github.com/dpsanders/matplotlib-examples/blob/master/linecolor.ipynb
>
> or
>
>
> http://nbviewer.ipython.org/urls/raw.github.com/dpsanders/matplotlib-examples/master/linecolor.ipynb
>

This looked pretty interesting when I first looked at it, but it seems to
be down now.


> Please let me have any comments before I attempt the next step of making a
> pull request.
> It seems to me that IPython notebooks are quite a natural format for such
> examples, especially with a view to having interactive examples in the
> future.
>

Using IPython notebooks as examples would be really beneficial in the long
run, as discussed during the BoF. I struggled with implementing support for
interleaved text, code, and plots for the scikit-image gallery (so that
examples could have real explanations). IPython notebooks are a more
natural format for this, but they're not quite there yet---specifically
nbconvert is still evolving (though this should be integrated into the next
release). That said, someone will need to write the code that takes the
output from nbconvert and integrates it with the current Sphinx code that
generates the gallery. Most of this will be straightforward but tedious.


> What is the situation with tagging the examples? If the examples are being
> refactored, it would seem to at least be a natural moment to start adding
> tags, even if nothing is actually done with them yet.
>

This is a great idea. I wish I had suggested this in my original MEP. I'm
not sure if there's been progress on adding an interface for tags, but we
should be adding tags during any clean ups to the examples so they're ready
in the future.

- Also during the BoF / sprint, style sheets were discussed several times.
> Tony seems to have already solved this problem in his mpltools package --
> I would suggest that this could be brought straight into Matplotlib?
>

This was my original plan. At the time I wrote the original, the rc parser
wasn't exposed to the user. That's been fixed now, but I haven't found the
time to integrate changes into Matplotlib proper. If anyone else would like
to have a go at it, they are more than welcome. Otherwise, I'll get to it
at some point ... hopefully.

Cheers!
-Tony