Re: [matplotlib-devel] Visio backend

[John H. <jdh...@ac...>]

>>>>> "HamletG" == HamletG  <ha...@ha...> writes:

    HamletG> Hi, It doesn't seem that there is much interest in a
    HamletG> Visio backend ;-) I saw John saying that the list of
    HamletG> contributors was already huge, etc. so I put up my own
    HamletG> "local" version of matplotlib, so I can continue easily
    HamletG> working on the Visio backend.

    HamletG> If you are curious about the progress, you can have a
    HamletG> look at http://www.hamletg.org/wiki/index.php/Matplotlib

Sorry for the silence on this -- I confess I had never heard of Visio
before your earlier post and did a little looking on the microsoft web
site.  It looked to me more like a flow chart application than a
graphing tool -- is that correct?

It is not an issue of a list of contributors -- I would love to have a
huge list -- it is more an issue of a proliferation of backends.  We
have too many, and most are incomplete, so my threshold is getting
higher for what I would like to see in the main distribution, because
often what happens is a developer adds just the features they need and
leave it at that and we have backends that are only partially
functional and poorly maintained.  I prefer to see a few core backends
that target the most popular GUIs and image formats.  Does you backend
support properly aligned rotated text, mathtext, images, collections
or images?  These are the features most people leave out because they
are harder to implement.  When we want to make any change to the
backend API we have to port these to all the backends and it is
usually me or one of a couple of developers to do this since the
original developer may have moved on.

That said, I would always be happy to include a (mostly) full featured
backend for a format a large number of users want.  Short of that, I
think distributing it through another channel, or making a sandbox in
the mpl distribution, with pointers to the source on the website will
suffice.  If you'd like to send a blurb for the website pointing to
your code I'll include it, or if you think given the above that the
Visio backend should be in the main distribution I'm happy to hear the
argument.  I don't use Windows so I am not really in tune with that
side of the development world, and am happy to be educated.

JDH