[matplotlib-devel] Re: toolbar buttons

[Steve C. <ste...@ya...>]

On Sat, 2004-08-14 at 11:42,
mat...@li... wrote:
> Hi, I searched for material related to this, but didn't find any, so I 
> hope this isn't a repeat. One feature that has been missing from 
> matplotlib that I find really useful is to print my graphs (I generate a 
> lot, and generally want a hard copy, but not a lot of random files lying 
> around). While on a unix system this is easy to do, I realize it is 
> rather difficult to make crossplatform. So instead I've been hacking the 
> source and adding my own button in. However, with each release this can 
> get a bit tiresome, so the idea occured to me that it would be nice if I 
> have a function to add buttons to the toolbar that could then run 
> arbritrary code.
> 
> I can submit my code if anyone is interested (it's a very rough hack, 
> and only for the GTK backend), but the idea is that in my own code I can 
> just do:
> 
> def myprint(*args, **kwargs):
>   fd, path = tempfile.mkstemp(suffix=".eps", dir="/tmp")
> 
>   savefig(path)
>   print "lpr %s" % path
>   os.system("lpr %s" % path)
> 
>   os.close(fd)
>   os.unlink(path)
> 
> 
> and later on:
> 
> add_toolbar_button("print", "prints figure", gtk.STOCK_PRINT, myprint)
> 
> I was curious as to what other people thought of this, and whether it 
> had a chance of ending up in matplotlib (being able to add other widgets 
> besides buttons would be extra cool).

Perhaps the .matplotlibrc file could have lines like
printcommand: None
printcommand: '"lpr %s" % path'
And if printcommand is not None an extra toolbar button is created which
calls 
os.system(printcommand)
to print the file.

Steve