ANN: matplotlib 0.1

[John Hunter]

Matplotlib 

  Matplotlib is a pure python plotting package for python and pygtk.
  My goal is to make high quality, publication quality plotting easy
  in python, with a syntax familiar to matlab users.  matplotlib is
  young, and several things need to be done for this goal is achieved.
  But it works well enough to make nice, simple plots.

Requirements

   python 2.2, GTK2, pygtk-1.99.x, and Numeric.

Download

   See the homepage - http://nitace.bsd.uchicago.edu:8080/matplotlib

Here are some of the things that matplotlib tries to do well

  * Allow easy navigation of large data sets.  Right click on figure
    window to bring up navigation tool bar for pan and zoom of x and y
    axes.  This requires a wheel mouse.  Place the wheel mouse over
    the navitation buttons and scroll away. 

  * Handle very large data sets efficiently by making use of Numeric
    clipping.  I have used matplotlib in an EEG plotting application
    with 128 channels and several minutes of data sampled at 400Hz,
    eg, plotting matrices with dimensions 120,000 x 128.

  * Choose tick marks and labels intelligently

  * make easy things easy (subplots, lines styles, colors)
 
  * make hard things possible (OO interface for full control)

Matplotlib is a class library that can be used to make plots in pygtk
applications.  But there is a matlab functional compatibility
interface that you can get with, eg::

  from matplotlib.matlab import plot, subplot, show, gca

Example scripts and screenshots available at
http://nitace.bsd.uchicago.edu:8080/matplotlib

John Hunter