using plotting contexts

I had looked at that. I'm a little confused by the

    > terminology though. This sounds like a prescription for
    > changing the defaults for some parameters for a session
    > rather than for a single figure. Do I misread that? (Also,
    > on my browser these entries are much wider than the browser
    > window for some reason; later in the faq that changes as do
    > some of the fonts. I wonder if something is screwed up
    > there).

You were rightfully confused. It said figure when it should say
session. I mainly work from scripts, with one figure per script, so I
was just munging them in my mind. I made a brief update to the FAQ in
my own tree, but with the dynamic customization you discuss below,
this will need to be updated again.

As for the browser problem, I have the same. I tried to spot an html
error that would explain it but haven't found it yet.

    > Changing the use of the rcParams to be immediate rather
    > than locked in at module initialization is more attractive
    > to me (and may allow one to assign differnt rc sets to
    > different backends by default as well; but that is not
    > urgent). Do you mind changing when the parameters are
    > picked up? (I'm asking that you do it now, just whether
    > that is acceptable).

This seems like the way to go. Nothing really speaks against it
except the slightly inelegant use of a bunch of Nones in the
constructors. I'm happy to make the changes, or leave it to one of
you.

JDH