Re: [matplotlib-devel] Incorporating TikZ into Matplotlib

[Neil G. <mis...@gm...>]

If you want to make arrowheads look at all decent, they really need to be
enclosed in Bezier curves.  See the diagram here:

http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/150289/how-do-you-accomplish-stealth-with-the-new-arrows-meta/230965#230965

The first two look like garbage.  The last one is the only one that looks
good imho.

Best,

Neil

On Wed, May 13, 2015 at 4:09 PM, Eric Firing <ef...@ha...> wrote:

> On 2015/05/13 9:36 AM, Neil Girdhar wrote:
>
>> I don't know matplotlib well enough (yet) to know what the change would
>> consist of.
>>
>> I suggest you take a look at the beautiful tikz manual:
>> http://pgf.sourceforge.net/pgf_CVS.pdf
>>
>
> Very helpful, thank you.
>
>
>> The arrows.meta on page 201–212 are really well-designed and beautiful.
>>
>> Compare this with matplotlib's custom arrows:
>>
>> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16968007/custom-arrow-style-for-matplotlib-pyplot-annotate
>>
>> How do I make tikz's arrowheads available for all backends?
>>
>>
> My guess offhand is that this is a matter of using the mpl API.  I don't
> think we would want to add all of these types and options to the mpl core;
> but a toolkit might be ideal for this.  The mpl API, which generates the
> same results for all backends, is quite complete and flexible.  Things like
> arrowheads are Patch objects, and you can specify any path you want.  The
> main trick is figuring out how to handle transforms--what kind of
> coordinates should the path be specifying?  How should things scale as a
> figure is reshaped and resized?
>
> For many of these types you could also use mpl Line2D objects, for which
> several properties including cap style can be specified.  Not all of the
> TikZ options would be available, but perhaps enough.
>
> Eric
>
>