[matplotlib-devel] Routine to show matrices?

[Fernando P. <Fer...@co...>]

Hi all,

one of the things which has been bugging me in my recent conversion to mpl has 
been the lack of a good matrix display routine, which would plot the arrays 
with 'upper' origin but row-descending numbers, and which would satisfy the 
colliding constraints of no stretching, a window with the aspect ratio of the 
original array, all within reasonable window sizes.

imshow, figimage and pcolor all fail to do this in different ways.  So I'm 
attaching here a new routine, which roughly does what I want (with current CVS 
code, since it needs my new figure() patch).  I called it matshow, for lack of 
a better name.  If you run the attached script via %run in a pylab session, it 
will display various arrays.

I think the functionality is a good improvement over the existing 
image-related display routines (I need something like this from day 1 if I'm 
to use matplotlib), but I have some doubts about my implementation.  I poked 
around inside matplotlib for a while, trying to finesse this functionality 
into imshow() itself, but I got hopelessly lost.  Perhaps a better coder than 
me can make it work, if y'all think the functionality is worth having.

If people don't mind the implementation, I guess I'd like to see it included 
(perhaps with a better name, and after a good review by the experts).  The 
docstring contains some notes about improvements I don't know how to make, and 
the code is heavily commented.

Regards,

f