I tried the new Agg backend, very nice. I'm all set
> to jettison GD altogether and go with Agg except that
> the anti-aliased graphs that look so great, print
> poorly.. 
Is there a way to turn off the
> anti-aliasing? It would be *great* to be able to drop
> that GD dependency.
agg plus/minus antialiasing is included in the next release, due out
soon. Alpha version is here if you want to test. Please report any
problems.
http://nitace.bsd.uchicago.edu:8080/files/share/matplotlib-0.51g.win32-py2.3.exe
JDH