Re: [matplotlib-devel] matlab_helpers and screen dpi/figsize refactored

[Jeremy O'D. <je...@o-...>]

John Hunter said:
>
[snip]
>
> Jeremy - what this means for you is some more changes.  Sorry to
> present you with an ever changing target.  I've been working pretty
> hard of late clearing up a lot of lingering issues.  Hopefully, we'll
> stabilize soon....

I'm not concerned by moving targets - the changes to date have been
sensible both in improving functionality and rationalising the backend
design.

Will try to commit appropriate changes today before I go off on a busines=
s
trip (back Friday, won't have CVS access before then, although I will tak=
e
a snapshot with me before I leave)

> Not sure this is perfect yet, but it seems to be a step in the right
> direction, and the relative sizes of the fonts to the figure appear to
> be better now -- previously too large in some backends, eg, GD.  There
> is still a discrepancy between relative font sizes between the
> backends (eg, GTK versus PS) which may have to do with the font dpi
> issue (75 versus 100 dpi fonts under X11) but am not sure.  In any
> case, I think the CVS changes are step in the right direction

I may need to think about font size scaling separately - currently I just
define the font point size, which probably is not what I should be doing.
I may not have time to do this today, but will try to think about it in
airport lounges ;-)

By the way, I noticed on the users list that people are asking for Debian
packages. I'm quite happy to do one, but would rather wait until things
have calmed down - I'll target the 4.0 release for a .deb on the
Sourceforge site.

We'll have to think about how the Debian package dependencies are worked
out. My inclination is that we should require appropriate support for at
least one backend, and suggest the others. Something like:

Required packages:    python2.3-numeric, python2.3-numeric-ext, fonttools
                      python2.3-gtk | libgd2-dev | libwxpython
Recommended packages: python2.3-gtk, libgd2-dev, libwxpython

This would allow a Debian user to install matplotlib for only one backend
(e.g. gd2 only for a webserver without X), but recommend packages to
support other backends. I can probably put simple packages for TTFQuery
and gdmodule , which could be 'suggested'.

Debian practice would normally provide separate packages matplotlib-doc
and matplotlib-examples, so I'll try to arrange that.

However, I don't really want to get into doing this until we are ready to
make the next release. Debian packaging isn't especially hard, but it is
rather tedious...

Regards

Jeremy