Matplotlib announces a major release [LWN.net]

By Forrest Cook
June 4, 2008

Matplotlib is a cross-platform numerical plotting and analysis library for Python:

matplotlib is a python 2D plotting library which produces publication quality figures in a variety of hardcopy formats and interactive environments across platforms. matplotlib can be used in python scripts, the python and ipython shell (ala matlab or mathematica), web application servers, and six graphical user interface toolkits. matplotlib tries to make easy things easy and hard things possible. You can generate plots, histograms, power spectra, bar charts, errorcharts, scatterplots, etc, with just a few lines of code.

Matplotlib version 0.71 was last examined on LWN in January, 2005. Recently, major release version 0.98.0 was announced:

matplotlib 0.98.0 is a major release which requires python2.4 and numpy 1.1. It contains significant improvements and may require some advanced users to update their code; see migration and API_CHANGES. We are supporting a maintenance branch of the older code available at matplotlib 0.91.3.

The major changes in matplotlib 0.98.0 include a complete rewrite of the transformation infrastructure and new support for user-defined transformations and projections. The full list of changes is available in the CHANGELOG file. The new matplotlib release coincides with the new release (version 1.1.0) of NumPy, the fundamental package needed for scientific computing with Python:

"This is the first minor release since the 1.0 release in October 2006. There are a few major changes, which introduce some minor API breakage. In addition this release includes tremendous improvements in terms of bug-fixing, testing, and documentation."

Looking forward to upcoming and in-progress matplotlib development, the Goals document explains a number of new matplotlib capabilities that are in the planning and development stages.

If you need to create any number of scientific data plots, matplotlib is an excellent choice for the job. It truly lives up to the claim of being easy to use. The latest matplotlib source code is available for download here.

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Matplotlib announces a major release

Posted Jun 8, 2008 14:48 UTC (Sun) by mmarsh (subscriber, #17029) [Link]

The last time I used matplotlib+scipy, when generating EPS output it embeds every glyph from
each font used.  The result was EPS files over 300KB, which is pretty much unacceptable for a
paper that will have half a dozen or more figures. PAW (from CERN) and R don't have this issue
-- their figures are at least an order of magnitude smaller.