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unifying [plotobject].show() interface + tests #1925

Open haraldschilly opened 16 years ago

haraldschilly commented 16 years ago

While working on #1766 I was not able to save 3d plots in files. There were also some other questions about printing/saving 3d plots in the discussion groups. I think there is a need for some unification.

First, my proposal is to distinguish between notebook-mode and non-interactive-script mode. I think this is a good idea, because in script mode somebody is usually not interested in a java applet or popup graphic, but want's to save the output.

Second, the .show() command should work the same. In #1766 I was able to save everything created by matplotlib but not the 3d stuff by tachyon. There should be a general design decision to make this possible. Or using another 3d plotting engine.

Third, there should be some kind of doctest to ensure this. e.g. plotting all possible output formats to a TempFile (python's temp files) and testing if the file exists and has size > 0kb.

There should also be some information (function returning a list of possible values) about the possible output formats. Also, the documentation of "plot" does not mention PDF, but PDF works.

This Issue is quite general, but I think it touches important problems...

Component: graphics

Issue created by migration from https://trac.sagemath.org/ticket/1925

williamstein commented 16 years ago
comment:1

This Issue is quite general, but I think it touches important problems...

This ticket should be marked invalid and replaced by specific tickets each of which has a very clear do-able description. Imagine trying to referee something that does everything described in the description above.

First, my proposal is to distinguish between notebook-mode and non-interactive-script mode. I think this is a good idea, because in script mode somebody is usually not interested in a java applet or popup graphic, but want's to save the output.

We already distinguish between:

So far nobody has even requested the functionality of having yet another mode. Before this level of complexity (hence potential confusion) is introduced, it needs to be carefully justified. Some people would find it very confusing that putting a couple commands in a file foo.sage and doing load foo.sage suddenly makes it so the behavior is different. This is so far not the case anywhere in Sage --- why should it be the case specifically with graphics? Would that go against how things are done in every other program too (e.g., Mathematica)?

Second, the .show() command should work the same. In #1766 I was able to save everything created by matplotlib but not the 3d stuff by tachyon. There should be a general design decision to make this possible. Or using another 3d plotting engine.

I'm not sure what this is suggesting actually.

Third, there should be some kind of doctest to ensure this. e.g. plotting all possible output formats to a TempFile? (python's temp files) and testing if the file exists and has size > 0kb.

Yes, everything needs doctests. By the way, when 3d graphics are doctested, every graphic is rendered using tachyon to I think a 10x10 image file, just to make sure rendering doesn't blow anything up.

There should also be some information (function returning a list of possible values) about the possible output formats. Also, the documentation of "plot" does not mention PDF, but PDF works.

By plot, do you actually mean the show or save commands called on the output of plot? In any case, they don't mention pdf because pdf output was really preliminary in matplotlib for a long time. I don't know if that is still the case. PDF seems to work well now when I tried a few random plots with it, so it's probably time to document this output format.