Summary

1. Concept
2. The class FigMyFirstFigure
3. Linking the class to the module
4. Using the figure

Concept

myplotlib is an interface between you and the great functionality of matplotlib.

As such it naturally inherit a lot of the structures from matplotlib: alike in matplotlib a plot is composed of four type of objects:

1. The window (that contains the buttons, and handle events)
2. The canvas (the sheet of paper where you draw the figure)
3. The figure (an empty object that contains an array of axes)
4. The axes (This is the core of the plot)

NOTE: If you have not read yet the page about axes you should start there

It is always a good idea to design figures, the sub-module mytools of myplotlib offers a few standard figure classes (FigOneAxes2D, ...) that are very practical for testing and fast development purposes, but at the end of the day you may want to access some more specific features.

A figure is a container for axes, and often it is useful to have several axes on the same figure, either for comparison, completeness, or user specific legends. Indeed, alike in matplotlib, colorbars and legends are axes.

The difference is that myplotlib provides an additional feature to figures: user-specific keywords!

Keywords are very practical, you can access them from all axes functions, these are the global variables of the figure. A further advantage they can be passed to the figure while creation and can be modified on the fly with the update function.

Therefore MyFig (the figure base class in myplotlib) has two functions that can be overwritten:

• declareKeywords: where you declare the keywords you need and there default values. (tech: create a fig.keywords dict)
• addAxes: the function where you tell the figure which axes to use and where to put them. (tech: uses fig.add_axes())

The class FigMyFirstFigure

Create mymodule/myFigures/<name of my class>.py

Here we will use mymodule/myFigures/figMyFirstFigure.py

# Import the mother class MyFig from the local myplotlib module
from ..myplotlib import MyFig

# Here you can also import any needed module
# ex: from .. import np
#        import numpy as np


# Begin of the class
class figMyFirstFigure(MyFig): 

    # The function where you declare the user-defined keywords (optional)
     def declareKeywords(self):

        # The size of the figure can be also defined here (optional)
        self.FIGSIZE = (8., 6.)  # the size are in inches. notes that a column in A&A is 8 inches.

        # the name of the dict is not optional.
        self.keywords = {'<name of the keyword>': <default value>,
                         'xunit': 'years',
                         'withAnotation': False,
                         'twoColumn': False,
                         ...}


    # The function where you tell the figure where tu plot what
    def addAxes(self):

        # the aspect ratio of the axes and its position in the figure
        ratioAxes1 = 6./8.
        frameAxes1 = [0, 0, 0.5, 1.0]  # [x0, y0, width, height] in unit of figwidth and figheight

        ratioAxes2 = 6./8.
        frameAxes2 = [0.5, 0.0, 0.5, 1.0]

        self.add_axes(AxMyFirstAxes(self, rationAxes1, frameAxes1))
        self.add_axes(AxMyFirstAxes(self, rationAxes2, frameAxes2))

Linking the new class to the module

Now that the figure class is created we just need to link it to the module. To do so you need to add the following line in mymodule/myFigures/__init__.py

from figMyFirstFigure import FigMyFirstFigure

the module mymodule import by default all figures in the sub-module myFigures, so you just need to tell myFigures to load the class FigMyFirstFigure from the file figMyFirstFigure.

Using the figure

Now you are ready to play with your new figure:

from mymodule import *
data = ...
fig = FigMyFirstFigure((data, data))
win = MyWin(fig)