2009/4/16 Ondrej Certik <ond...@certik.cz>: > > Hi, > > the notebook (sagelite) can work with Graphics primitives in Sage, > that's very nice. > > I would like to make sympy (and other packages) to be able to easily > work with the plotting. One way to do plotting is to use matplotlib > (or anything else) and drop a .png file, the notebook will show it. > > But I think a better way is to just return a Graphics object, as described at: > > http://sagemath.org/doc/reference/sage/plot/plot.html > > since the notebook can plot that one too.
The notebook plots graphics objects by just making the show command (on a graphics object) output a png. There is nothing at all special about how the notebook plots Graphics 2d objects -- anything that outputs a png gets "plotted" and that is it. It's an incredibly simple "protocol", but means that you just immediately use it in your code. > That would work for 2D > plots. For 3D plots, Sage seems to be using a little bit different > architecture: > > sage: G = plot3d(lambda x, y: x^2 + y^2, (-2,2), (-2,2)) > sage: type(G) > <type 'sage.plot.plot3d.parametric_surface.ParametricSurface'> > > as described at: > > http://sagemath.org/doc/reference/plot3d.html For 3d plots it's really very similar, but of course they aren't always png's. Calling show with viewer="tachyon" just renders a png, and we're in the above case. Calling show with no options (no viewer="tachyon") uses jmol, which means that a certain file type is output. The notebook then notices that file was created and embeds a java jmol applet configured using that file. Anyway, I'm just hopefully clarifying how things work now. I'm not actually answering your questions below though. > > > What is the best way to get other packages using it too? So that they > play nicely with the notebook and also with Sage, if the user install > them in Sage, but also outside Sage, if the user wants to use just the > package + notebook, or even a command line, in which case it should > popup a matplotlib window (and mayavi window in 3D for me). > > I think the way to do it would be that the library (be it sympy or > anything else) would have some plot command/method, that returns an > instance, > > G = plot(something) > > that has some common API, e.g. a > > G._plot_() > > method and the Sage notebook would check if the returned object has > such a method and if so, just call it to produce a plot, it could > accept a parameter, like > > G._plot_(method="notebook") > > that would produce a .png image, or > > G._plot_(method="commandline") > > that would popup a matplotlib/mayavi/whatever window. It seems to me > that in Sage, the G._plot_ method is actually called G.show() and > G.save() ? > > > As to handling different axes/zoom in/out, in Sage, the G object has > methods like .xmax() and it seems to work nice. > But that is a business of the G object, as far as Sage is concerned, > as long as the object has _plot_ method (or "show", whatever the name > is), it just calls it? > > So we just need to support this API and that's it. Is show() and > save() the only two methods we need to implement? Or is there anything > else? > > Ondrej > > > > -- William Stein Associate Professor of Mathematics University of Washington http://wstein.org --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-devel-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
