[matplotlib-devel] Re: Improved font manager

[Paul B. <ba...@st...>]

John Hunter wrote:
> 
> Another concern I have is that if I am reading the code correctly all
> the afm files are being parsed at load time, even for non-postscript
> backends.  Some users have hundreds of afm files in their path, and on
> a slowish machine this can impose a substantial performance hit.  In
> the past, I deferred parsing the afm files for the non-ps backends
> until they were called for, eg, until a call to
> savefig('somefile.ps').  Don't know if this is easy or possible to
> incorporate in the current design, but it's something to think about.

Hi John,

This was an easy change to the font manager.  You should see it in CVS later today.

On a related issue, I noticed that the sizes of PS plots are different depending 
on which backend is used first.  If I send a plot directly to the PS backend, I 
get a nice plot (see the attachment simple_plot_PS.ps).  Whereas, if I first 
display the plot using TkAgg and then save it to PS, I get a plot that is much 
larger than the display area (see the attachment simple_plot.ps).  The text size 
in both plots appears to be the same size, this would indicate an incorrect 
scaling factor somewhere.

  -- Paul

-- 
Paul Barrett, PhD      Space Telescope Science Institute
Phone: 410-338-4475    ESS/Science Software Branch
FAX:   410-338-4767    Baltimore, MD 21218