errorbar plot with different markers

Community matplotlib-users
1

Hi All,

A question for a possible new feature for Matplotlib.

First, in case there is a way to do it currently:

I often find myself plotting data with errorbars, and I would like to be able to modify the marker, or marker size of each individual point separately. A (seemingly to me) natural way to do this would allow

marker
markersize
markerfacecolor
markeredgecolor

etc accept arrays, as well as a single kwarg. As far as I can tell, if I have a set of data, and I want to make the markers with different sizes, the only way to do this is have a loop that calls each data point individually and assigns the marker features.

1 - am I mistaken? and if so, could someone instruct me how to achieve my goal

2 - does anyone else find this feature desirable? If so, could this be added to Matplotlib? I have not the coding experience to attempt this myself - but I imagine the simplest thing to do would be check if the marker, ms, etc are given single kwargs, or arrays. If single, everything happens as now. If array, then check the len of the array against the len of the data, and if the same, match the entries.

Thanks,

Andre

2

Hi All,

A question for a possible new feature for Matplotlib.

First, in case there is a way to do it currently:

I often find myself plotting data with errorbars, and I would like to be able to modify the marker, or marker size of each individual point separately. A (seemingly to me) natural way to do this would allow

marker

markersize

markerfacecolor

markeredgecolor

etc accept arrays, as well as a single kwarg. As far as I can tell, if I have a set of data, and I want to make the markers with different sizes, the only way to do this is have a loop that calls each data point individually and assigns the marker features.

That’s how I would do it right now.

1 - am I mistaken? and if so, could someone instruct me how to achieve my goal

2 - does anyone else find this feature desirable? If so, could this be added to Matplotlib? I have not the coding experience to attempt this myself - but I imagine the simplest thing to do would be check if the marker, ms, etc are given single kwargs, or arrays. If single, everything happens as now. If array, then check the len of the array against the len of the data, and if the same, match the entries.

I personally would love to see more consistent support for features like this across all plotting and collection types. However, there are some issues that prevent making this an easy fix. The primary issue is distinguishing user intent with respect to colors. Right now, a user could specify color as a string or a rgb tuple. Now, if we accept an array of those things, it becomes harder to determine the user’s intent.

The way forward, I think, is some sort of decorator library (dbook.py?) that provides a common set of methods that all plotting and collection functions could use to consistently prepare input data.

I encourage you to file a feature request on github, but for now, the best way seems to be looping the errorbar call.

Cheers,
Ben Root

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On Tue, Aug 16, 2011 at 7:12 PM, Andre’ Walker-Loud <walksloud@…287…> wrote: