colorbar for figure not mappable - zap edge lines

To reply to my own post: On question (1): I modified the

    > call to colorbar in pylab.py to accept a color map and norm
    > keyword arguments. It was this functionality that was

Perhaps it would be cleaner simply to derive a custom class from
ScalarMappable that does your fill calls and stores your cmap and norm
instances; then you would get the observer stuff for free. If you
decide to go this route, perhaps you could submit the example.

    > I would also like to code up a floating color bar. Often I
    > make 4/5 images per page with a common colormap and
    > normalization. It is handy just to plop the reference
    > colorbar in a central location not attached to a particular
    > figure.

I just committed changes to CVS to support this -- you can now place a
colorbar in a custom axes, and I added an orientation kwarg to
support horizontal or vertical colorbar layout. Make sure you get
pylab.py revision 1.21 or later.

Here is an example

from pylab import *

ax = axes([0.1, 0.3, 0.8, 0.6])
im = imshow(rand(12,12), interpolation='nearest')

cax = axes([0.1, 0.1, 0.8, 0.15])
colorbar(cax=cax, orientation='horizontal')
show()

    > On question (2): Alan Isaac pointed out that using the same
    > edgecolor as the fillcolor would make the borders
    > invisible.

Yep.

JDH