Equal axis on visualization

[jon-wurtz]

A handy new functionality! One small request: Can the axis be set as equal, so spatial distances in X and Y are reproduced in the plot. In the screenshot below, the X and Y extent are the same but this is not clear due to the plot stretching.

I would also be careful with fonts and localizations with these sorts of plots https://github.com/QuEraComputing/Bloqade.jl/issues/557

[kaihsin]

I think its possible to set them to be "approximately looks the same", if manually set plot_size(width=2*x, height=x) considering a character is display in height:width ~ 2:1 in terminal on screen? @johnzl-777

[johnzl-777]

@jon-wurtz makes a reasonable point about the fonts/localizations. I'm led to believe there should be a way to programmatically check if a users terminal supports unicode or if it doesn't, in which case I could replace the unicode dot marker with a single character (say, an ASCII period or something less exciting).

@kaihsin I'm hesitant to tamper with plot_size like that, I've fixed it to 80 x 24 with #415 (80x24 being the standard dimensions most terminals usually are by default). There might be another setting in plotext for scaling

[jon-wurtz]

Why not add matplotlib as a dependency and have it draw the atom positions with whatever settings the user has set?

[johnzl-777]

Does matplotlib have terminal plotting capabilities? The whole point of this feature was just to give users a quick and dirty way of seeing the atom positions.

For a truly nice plot @kaihsin 's work with Bokeh gives a nice interactive visualization in the browser 😃

[kaihsin]

@jon-wurtz makes a reasonable point about the fonts/localizations. I'm led to believe there should be a way to programmatically check if a users terminal supports unicode or if it doesn't, in which case I could replace the unicode dot marker with a single character (say, an ASCII period or something less exciting).

@johnzl-777 ,FYI if you are pursue this: I did the auto detect of unicode in the tree printing unicode_enabled = sys.stdout.encoding.lower().startswith("utf")

@kaihsin I'm hesitant to tamper with plot_size like that, I've fixed it to 80 x 24 with #415 (80x24 being the standard dimensions most terminals usually are by default). There might be another setting in plotext for scaling

I see. I was thinking just fix the "ratio" of width/height = 2, so the plot looks like square. But tbh I think terminal is just for quick check. If user want better display, maybe just do show??

[weinbe58]

having equal sizes for x and y axes won't fix the issue of distortion. This only fixes the issue for a square lattice or a lattice that is bounded by a square region fixing the x and y bounds. In order to avoid distortion one would need to add padding to the x or y axes in general.

[johnzl-777]

I agree with @weinbe58 here.

@johnzl-777 ,FYI if you are pursue this: I did the auto detect of unicode in the tree printing unicode_enabled = sys.stdout.encoding.lower().startswith("utf")

This is perfect @kaihsin , I'll probably go ahead and add this as a feature!

I see. I was thinking just fix the "ratio" of width/height = 2, so the plot looks like square. But tbh I think terminal is just for quick check. If user want better display, maybe just do show??

Yes, I would agree with just using show. In my eyes the lattice pprint is just meant as a sanity check of sorts.