Book Image

Matplotlib for Python Developers

Book Image

Matplotlib for Python Developers

Overview of this book

Providing appealing plots and graphs is an essential part of various fields such as scientific research, data analysis, and so on. Matplotlib, the Python 2D plotting library, is used to produce publication-quality figures in a variety of hardcopy formats and interactive environments across platforms. This book explains creating various plots, histograms, power spectra, bar charts, error charts, scatter-plots and much more using the powerful Matplotlib library to get impressive out-of-the-box results. This book gives you a comprehensive tour of the key features of the Matplotlib Python 2D plotting library, right from the simplest concepts to the most advanced topics. You will discover how easy it is to produce professional-quality plots when you have this book to hand. The book introduces the library in steps. First come the basics: introducing what the library is, its important prerequisites (and terminology), installing and configuring Matplotlib, and going through simple plots such as lines, grids, axes, and charts. Then we start with some introductory examples, and move ahead by discussing the various programming styles that Matplotlib allows, and several key features. Further, the book presents an important section on embedding applications. You will be introduced to three of the best known GUI libraries 'GTK+, Qt, and wxWidgets' and presented with the steps to implement to include Matplotlib in an application written using each of them. You will learn through an incremental approach: from a simple example that presents the peculiarities of the GUI library, to more complex ones, using GUI designer tools. Because the Web permeates all of our activities, a part of the book is dedicated to showing how Matplotlib can be used in a web environment, and another section focuses on using Matplotlib with common Python web frameworks, namely, Pylons and Django. Last, but not least, you will go through real-world examples, where you will see some real situations in which you can use Matplotlib.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
Matplotlib for Python Developers
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface

Embedding Matplotlib in a Glade application


Glade is a user interface designer that allows to create and edit user interfaces for GTK+ applications.

Glade is used to place GTK+ widgets in a GUI, and change the layout or the properties of each widget. It also allows to add connections between those widgets and the application code.

Glade stores the GUI design in an XML format, and by using libglade, Glade XML files can be dynamically loaded in applications developed in several programming languages (Python included).

The example we are going to present is about counting the letters in a file and then plotting the result. If you have ever studied basic cryptography, you were taught that e is the most common letter in the English writings—this is your chance to experimentally verify that!

Before presenting and discussing the Python code, we will describe how we have designed the GUI with Glade.

Designing the GUI using Glade

When Glade executable is started (with no glade file as parameter), it...