I've spent the last couple of days refactoring the matplotlib
backends, fixing bugs and adding some functionality. Here's a
synopsis of what's new. I encourage everyone to try it out so
complaints and bugs can be handled before the major release.
** Note there are some API changes so please read about this below **
** Note, GD users, GD rendering is significantly improved in my
opinion. However, some of new functionality requires a recent
version of gd and a patch of the latest gdmodule, see below **
What's new in matplotlib 0.50e
GD supports clipping and antialiased line drawing. The line object
has a new 'antialiased' property, that if true, the backend will
render the line antialiased if supported. **You will need to
upgrade to gd-2.0.15 or later and gdmodule-0.51. You will also need
to replace _gdmodule.c with the code as described at
http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/backends.html#GD.
wild and wonderful bar charts
You can provide an optional argument 'bottom' to the bar command to
determine where the bottom of each bar is, default 0 for all. This
enables stacked bar plots and candelstick plots --
examples/bar_stacked.py. Thanks to David Moore and John Gill for
suggestions and code.
Bugfixes (by backend)
* All : the yticks on the right hand side were placed incorrectly,
now fixed
* All : ticklabels now make a more intelligent choice about how
many significant digits to display
* GD : An int truncation bug was causing the dotted lines to
disappear
* GD and GTK : Fixed line width to scale with DPI
* GD : Fixed small text layout bug
* GD : Fixed the constant for GD which maps pixels per inch - this
should give better agreement with other backends witht he
relative sizes of objects
* GTK : Dash spacing was not properly scaling with DPI
Figure backend refactored
The figure functionality was split into a backend independent
component Figure and a backend dependent component
FigureCanvasBase. This completes the transition to a totally
abstract figure interface and improves the ability the switch
backends. See the file
http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/API_CHANGES that comes with the
src distro for information on migrating applications to the new API.
All the backend specific examples have been updated to the new API.
Enjoy,
John Hunter