[Matplotlib-users] Postscript bounding box calculations

[matthew a. <ma...@ca...>]

Hi,

Currently matplotlib outputs postscript graphs which have no bounding box
set. This means that by default they fill the whole page. If you want to
include several plots in the same page in a document (because you
generated them separately, or because the subplot output is a bit messy)
then you have to manually crop each postscript graph. (Atleast that is my 
experience with LaTeX via lyx, Word is presumably similar.)

I tried a few tools to fix this. I finally found bbfig:

http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/contrib/noarch/noarch/bbfig-1.14-2.noarch.html

which correctly calculates the bounding box for an arbitrary
postscript file.

As hinted by this page:

http://www.mcs.kent.edu/mcsinfo/compsys/faq/cmds/bbfig.html

you can do

bbfig yourfile.ps | ghostview -

to see the bounding box visually. But /usr/doc/bbfig-1.14/README.RPM
says you can also do

bbfig myfigure.ps | gs -q -dNODISPLAY -

then add it output to the top of the ps file to have it be correctly
cropped.

bbfig is coded in postscript! But I thought you might be interested
in case you want to fix matplotlib so that it outputs correctly
bounded (e)ps files by default.

Cheers,
Matthew.