Ga?l> On Fri, Jul 07, 2006 at 03:46:01PM -0500, John Hunter wrote:
>> Ideally, I would like to see PS, SVG, Agg and
>> [Tk|GTK|WX|Qt|FLTK]Agg and no more. But I know that other
>> people feel differently.
Ga?l> pdf seems very important to me.
PDF is certainly an important document format, but it doesn't seem to
be widely used for figures. I often make pdf documents but
incorporate PNG figures into them (eg PDF latex). My backend list
above is not a list of backends that I think matplotlib should support
as much as it is a list of backends that I personally find useful and
would personally support even if noone else did. Any backend that is
supported by someone should remain in, even if they are the only one
using it, in my opinion. But most backends are not supported.
Only PS and Agg (and by extension all of the GTK* backends) support
all of matplotlib's features. This should give some indication of how
much work it is to develop a fully compliant backend, and why we have
an incentive to minimize the number of them.
JDH