[Matplotlib-users] Rendering SciPy docstrings as markup text within matplotlib

[federico v. <vag...@gm...>]

Hi,

SciPy (and NumPy) docstrings are written with a special kind of mark up:

For example, the docstring for the russellrao distance function looks like
this:

'\n    Computes the Russell-Rao dissimilarity between two boolean 1-D
arrays.\n\n    The Russell-Rao dissimilarity between two boolean 1-D
arrays, `u` and\n    `v`, is defined as\n\n    .. math::\n\n      \\frac{n
- c_{TT}}\n           {n}\n\n    where :math:`c_{ij}` is the number of
occurrences of\n    :math:`\\mathtt{u[k]} = i` and :math:`\\mathtt{v[k]} =
j` for\n    :math:`k < n`.\n\n    Parameters\n    ----------\n    u : (N,)
array_like, bool\n        Input array.\n    v : (N,) array_like, bool\n
   Input array.\n\n    Returns\n    -------\n    russellrao : double\n
   The Russell-Rao dissimilarity between vectors `u` and `v`.\n\n    '

What's the most efficient way to turn this into a format where you can
format it nicely as a matplotlib text object?

I tried:

    fig = plt.figure()

ax = fig.add_subplot(111)

props = dict(boxstyle='round', facecolor='wheat', alpha=0.5)

textstr = dist_fcn.__doc__

textstr = textstr.replace('math:',' ')

textstr = textstr.replace('`', '$')

textstr = textstr.replace('\n\n where', '$\n\n where')

ax.text(0.05, 0.95, textstr, transform=ax.transAxes, fontsize=14,

verticalalignment='top', bbox=props)


Which does an 'ok' job, at best, since fractions aren't converted properly.
 Is there a way to do it nicely short of using some horrendous regular
expressions?


Federico