Re: [matplotlib-devel] Re: PS backend wish list

[Darren D. <dd...@co...>]

On Monday 04 April 2005 12:09 pm, John Hunter wrote:
>
> I agree ticks (and text in general) are too expensive.  In my
> experience, this is usually only starts a problem in animated plots
> (do you have another use case in mind?).  I think we might be able to
> work around this particular problem by supporting the drawing of only
> a subset of the artists in the scene.  
[...]
>
>
> I'm not opposed to a redesign of the Tick drawing if there are
> appreciable gains to be had, but my guess is we may get more bang for
> the buck in special casing the typical text layout (angle=0.0, no
> mathtext, no unicode) and handling dynamic updates more intelligently.

Data acquisition is a good example of where a new tick protocol would be 
useful. Supposing the user wants a plot in their gui that autoscales after 
the addition of each new point (which is not uncommon), the ticks would need 
to render as quickly as possible.

Everytime somebody I work with complains about the LabView program from 
National Instruments, I think about how nice it would be to do data 
acquisition with Python. I had hoped that Taco would mature into a solid 
library for interfacing with scientific instruments, but the project doesnt 
seem very active, judging by their webpage http://www.esrf.fr/taco/.

-- 

Darren