I'm continuing to learn the low level object oriented matplotlib API. My goal is to create very customizable, perfect plots. Here is how to draw a simple line. First create a figure that is 4 inches by 4 inches. Then create some axes with a 10% margin around each edge. Then add the axes to the figure. Then create a line from (0,0) to (1,1). Then add the line to the axes. Then create a canvase. Then create the .png file. Looks like good object oriented python fun to me...
""" line_ex.py
"""
from matplotlib.figure import Figure ...
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This article has a good description of the 2 API's in matplotlib: the pylab API and the matplotlib API. I've been using the pylab interface because it is easier, especially coming from a matlab background. But I wanted to get direct access to the matplotlib classes so I needed to use the matplotlib API. Here is a simple example that creates a .png figure using the 2 different API's.
Here is the example using the pylab API:
""" api_pylab.py
"""
from pylab import *
figure(figsize=[4,4])
axes([.1,.1,.8,.8])
scatter([1,2],[3,4])
savefig ...
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Here is an example of how to create some derived arrow classes with matplotlib and python. The arrow() function
in matplotlib accepts origin and delta x and delta y inputs. I changed this to polor coordinates so Arrow2 accepts the x and y coordinates of the origin, the length, and the angle. Then I created 4 classes derived from Arrow2 called ArrowRight, ArrowLeft, ArrowUp, and ArrowDown. These just set the angle for you to 0, 180, 90, and 270 respectively.
Notice too that the **kwargs can be passed down so you can still set all the other parameters.
""" arrow_ex2.py ...
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Here is an example of how to draw an arrow with matplotlib. It should be
very easy, but I had to change the width setting so the arrow head would
not be too small. Further documentation is here:
http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/matplotlib.pylab.html#-arrow""" arrow_ex.py
"""
from pylab import *
figure()
axes()
arrow(.1,.1,.2,.2, width=0.01)
show()
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I needed to make some pie charts and didn't like the results I got from Excel. It was too hard to customize the plots exactly the way I wanted them. I have used Matlab before and I preferred Matlab to Excel. However, Python is my favorite thing to use so I searched for python and matlab on Google and found matplotlib. Matplotlib is a matlab-like plotting library for Python. You can get matplotlib from
http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/, but it is also bundled with the Enthought version of Python so I got it from there. Update: I realized that ...
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