Multiple column legends

Hi!
About a year ago, Jouni Seppänen indicated how to put a number of patches in a
legend. So far so good. Now, it turns out that I do have quite a lot of
patches to throw into this legend, and it would be nice, rather than to have
a single column, to have the possibility to arrange these patches (and
associated labels) into columns. I have looked at the legend object, but
there is nothing suggesting that things can be shuffled around within the
legend box itself, some sort of "subplot()" for the legend patches. Am I
correct in assuming this doesn't exist (yet!). I am running 0.91.2, maybe
it's already been implemented, but I thought I'd ask!

Cheers!
J

···

--
NERC Centre for Terrestrial Carbon Dynamics,
Department of Geography, University College London
Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT, UK

You're right: multi-column legends aren't implemented.

There have been a number of points raised lately around the layout of legends (such as baseline alignment), that are starting to add up to a push for a (partial) rewrite of the legend code. Unfortunately, I don't think anyone has stepped up with time available to work on it. But I think this should go on the list of things to consider, assuming we can come up with a nice clean interface to present to the user. It would be helpful to collect use cases for that. For example, would an option "numcols" be enough (and the legend would just layout the text in that number of columns), or would you want/need more control over where individual elements are placed?

Of course, we're always looking for new developers, and if you have the motivation to work on this, I'm sure the various people on this list would be happy to help you work through it.

Cheers,
Mike

Jose G�mez-Dans wrote:

···

Hi!
About a year ago, Jouni Sepp�nen indicated how to put a number of patches in a legend. So far so good. Now, it turns out that I do have quite a lot of patches to throw into this legend, and it would be nice, rather than to have a single column, to have the possibility to arrange these patches (and associated labels) into columns. I have looked at the legend object, but there is nothing suggesting that things can be shuffled around within the legend box itself, some sort of "subplot()" for the legend patches. Am I correct in assuming this doesn't exist (yet!). I am running 0.91.2, maybe it's already been implemented, but I thought I'd ask!

Cheers!
J

--
Michael Droettboom
Science Software Branch
Operations and Engineering Division
Space Telescope Science Institute
Operated by AURA for NASA

I'd be willing to put some time in on that... I've not ever
contributed code for anything though, so I'll be on a learning curve.
I've had this problem myself. I would think a number of columns or a
number of rows argument either would work.. just restrict based on one
or the other, and if both are given... not sure about that one.
What's a sensible way to ignore one or the other?

···

On Tue, Sep 9, 2008 at 9:03 AM, Michael Droettboom <mdroe@...86...> wrote:

You're right: multi-column legends aren't implemented.

There have been a number of points raised lately around the layout of
legends (such as baseline alignment), that are starting to add up to a
push for a (partial) rewrite of the legend code. Unfortunately, I don't
think anyone has stepped up with time available to work on it. But I
think this should go on the list of things to consider, assuming we can
come up with a nice clean interface to present to the user. It would be
helpful to collect use cases for that. For example, would an option
"numcols" be enough (and the legend would just layout the text in that
number of columns), or would you want/need more control over where
individual elements are placed?

Of course, we're always looking for new developers, and if you have the
motivation to work on this, I'm sure the various people on this list
would be happy to help you work through it.

Cheers,
Mike