[Matplotlib-users] Qt4 Designer Example

[Ryan N. <rne...@gm...>]

Hello list,

A couple months ago, I spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out how
to use Qt designer create a GUI with an embedded MPL window. Unfortunately,
the Scipy cookbook page (
http://wiki.scipy.org/Cookbook/Matplotlib/Qt_with_IPython_and_Designer) is
very outdated. A recent post (
http://matplotlib.1069221.n5.nabble.com/Re-Keep-list-of-figures-or-plots-and-flip-through-list-using-UI-td44961.html)
brought up some questions about a use case very similar to mine, so I redid
my example and was going to write a quick tutorial for the docs.

Unfortunately, I'm not a Qt guru, so I thought that I would ask on the list
for some advice.  The OP and I were both interested in being able to have a
list of figures that you could select from to change the plot window. The
embedding examples in the docs create subclasses of FigureClass* and embed
the plotting figure/axes/etc. This works but gets tricky, though, when
trying to switch plots. Also, for interactive IPython work, I didn't like
that the plotting objects were mixed in with all the QtGui.QWidget
attributes, which makes introspective searching painful. My solution was to
create a dictionary of matplotlib.figure.Figure objects that had all of the
plotting stuff defined. Then when I select a new plot from the list, the
old one is removed and a new FigureClass object is created using the
selected Figure object. Has anyone else successfully done something like
this? Is there a better way? Also, it seems if I zoom the current plot,
change to a new plot, and change back, the zoom region is retained. Anyone
know how to reset the zoom region?

Attached is my example: "window.py" is the Designer-created main window and
"custommpl.py" is the subclass of the main window that I wrote. It's about
as short as I could make it.

Thanks

Ryan