What's new in matplotlib 0.53
Improved font manager and support
Paul Barrett has thoroughly overhauled font support. FontTools and
ttfquery are no longer required for font finding as matplotlib now
has a completely freestanding freetype2 implementation and font
finder. Among other things, this should enable you to specify fonts
in your scripts and matplotlibrc file and generate consistent
figures across backends and operating systems. The font finder
algorithm and implementation are based on the W3C standard
http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-CSS1-19990111.
See the font manager module documentation, the fonts documentation
http://matplotlib.sf.net/fonts.html and the updated .matplotlibrc
file for more details; please update your .matplotlibrc. Thanks
Paul!
Backend WXAgg
Antigrain rendering to wxpython applications and figure windows. Now
wx users have access to all the latest matplotlib functionality,
including mathtext, antialised drawing, alpha blending and image
support.
Major and minor ticks
Full support for major and minor ticks with a bevy of more
intelligent tick locators supplied in the ticker module. Fully
customizable and user definable tick locators and formatters. See
major_minor_demo1.py and major_minor_demo2.py. The default tick
labeler is much more intelligent is choosing good tick locations.
See http://matplotlib.sf.net/matplotlib.ticker.html
Date plots
A new command a plot_date command for plotting date dependent data;
see http://matplotlib.sf.net/screenshots.html#date_demo. Converters
supplied in the dates module allow you to work with a variety of
datetime instances. Custom date locators and formatters allow you to
place major and minor ticks by minute, hour, weekday, month, year,
etc, and use strftime format strings to format the ticks. See
examples date_demo1.py and date_demo2.py. The dates documentation
provides an overview and guide to with dates -
see http://matplotlib.sf.net/matplotlib.dates.html.
Ported image support to numarray and postscript backend
The image module now works with Numeric or numarray, and now works
in the postscript backend as well as GTKAgg, TkAgg, WXAgg, Agg, and
GTK. Thanks to Todd Miller for the PS work!
Changes to matplotlibrc
Many features added to the default config file for font support,
tkagg windowing in win32, and more. Please use the new file at
http://matplotlib.sf.net/.matplotlibrc. By default, the installer
will overwrite the existing file in the install path, so if you want
to preserve your's, please move it to your HOME dir and set the
environment variable if necessary.
load and save commands
Helper functions for loading and saving ASCII arrays. See load and
save in the matlab interface.
Two scales on the same axes
Added some features to the axis and ticks to allow two plots with
different scales on the "same" axes with different scales, ticks and
labels on the left and right side of the x axis. To see why same is
quoted, see examples/two_scales.py.
finance module
The finance module includes a function to fetch quotes from yahoo,
to draw candlestick plots, and to draw vertical line plots for
high-low range with open-close ticks to the left and right. I'm
hoping that user contributions will make up the bulk of this module
since I'm not a finance guy! See
http://matplotlib.sf.net/screenshots.html#date_demo.