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

[David P. S. <dps...@gm...>]

On Sun, Jul 7, 2013 at 10:14 PM, Tony Yu <ts...@gm...> wrote:

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

Hi Tony,

It was great to meet you too!


>
>
> 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.
>

Yes, I do understand your point, but I feel strongly that providing simple
interfaces for otherwise complicated concepts / syntax is important, and
very much in the spirit of matplotlib as I understand it.



>
>
>> 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.
>

Apologies, I decided that 'colorline' was a better name than 'linecolor'
(since 'colorline' suggests that we are going to color a line, i.e. it puts
the verb and the noun in the correct order!), so I changed the notebook to

https://github.com/dpsanders/matplotlib-examples/blob/master/colorline.ipynb


http://nbviewer.ipython.org/urls/raw.github.com/dpsanders/matplotlib-examples/master/colorline.ipynb




>
>
>> Please let me have any comments before I attempt the next step of making
>> a pull request.
>>
>

I am trying to get to making a pull request, but am having trouble
incorporating the plot correctly into the gallery:
I have been trying to include colorline.py in the correct place in the
examples tree to have it added automatically to the gallery.
Somebody (don't remember who exactly -- Mike?) showed me how to do this
during the sprint, but I have been unable to reproduce the steps
successfully.

Could you please remind me exactly where I should put the file, and what
the correct sequence of commands to execute is? Is there a special format
that the file should have? For example, it seems that it should only have
one  plt.show()  following the other examples with multiple plots -- is
that right?
(I once managed to get a single one of the plots to show in the gallery,
and have not been able to reproduce that feat since!)



>  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.
>

The current git master of ipython indeed has nbconvert integrated. The
Python script output is also in my git repository -- these kind of outputs
should be easy to parse.
(Though I personally have no idea where to even start with something like
that. Any suggestions? Is there some kind of standard package for this kind
of thing?)



>
>
>> 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
>

I agree that it should be added to the MEP. From my point of view, the
exact tags that should be used may well be something that evolves over time.



>
> - 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.
>

OK, great.

Best,
David.


>
> Cheers!
> -Tony
>



-- 
**************************************************************************
Dr. David P. Sanders

Profesor Titular A / Associate Professor
Departamento de Física, Facultad de Ciencias
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM)

dps...@gm...
http://sistemas.fciencias.unam.mx/~dsanders

Cubículo / office: #414
Tel.: +52 55 5622 4965