I am building a GUI application using Wxpython which requires 3-d scatter plots. I have tried using the following libraries but with shortcomings:
Matplotlib: Very slow rendering, panning and zooming needs workarounds.
plot.ly: I tried creating a wxpython webview and loading the plotly html from there, but wxpython webview does not seem to support WebGL which is required for 3d rendering. Have a look at this question for details.
mayavi: I am unable to figure how I can embed mayavi into wxpython GUI. This example at mayavi docs
just open a blank wx frame. Comments at this SO answer suggests that mayavi doesn't support Wxpython 4+.
Are there any 'decent' 3d-plotting libraries which support wxpython or is matplotlib my only option here?
[edit after comment]: The plot should be interactive(at least pan and zoom). The plot should preferably be inside a panel in wxpython. The data will be static.
Related
Plotly says it is a web library. Matplotlib does support Wxpython but comparatively, it is too low level. Is there any way to integrate Plotly inside a Wxpython GUI or are there any alternative for it?
You might be able to use Plotly's ability to export plots to images to get the plots into wxPython:
https://plot.ly/python/offline/#static-image-export
If you need the live plotting though, then you will need to use Webview:
https://wxpython.org/Phoenix/docs/html/wx.html2.WebView.html
I also see that Plotly can now be used offline, so if you used that plus Webview, it should work.
Wxpython webview doesn't support 3-d graphs from plotly.
For 3-d graphs, I used cefpython. It embeds a full chromium browser inside python application. wxpython example can be found here: https://github.com/cztomczak/cefpython/blob/master/examples/wxpython.py.
I used plotly offline, and read the file inside cefpython.
I'm using matplotlib 2.2.2. with ipython 3.6.5 (both from anaconda) for data analysis. Whenever I create a figure window with some boilerplate code like
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
plt.ion()
plt.plot()
I get a nice figure window to which I can only switch focus by using with the mouse. These figure windows are not part of the list of macosx application switcher (accessible through cmd+tab shortcut). I've tried the osx and the qt5 backends, but I get the same results as described before.
Do you know any solution/workaround for this? It would be very practical to be able to switch focus between figure windows from the keyboard, as I often find myself browsing through the figure windows looking for the graph I'm interested in. Moreover, if matplotlib's figure windows were actual cocoa/macos windows, it would be extremely useful to those out there who use tiling window managers on osx.
I have a list of value need to be drawn. The problem is have a format. How can I draw a graph with this kind of value. Im using python 2.7 with wxPython.
This is the link to the value, I cannot paste it here because the format will change
The wxPython project has a separate demo package you can download and install. Get that and look at the PyPlot demo. It can most simple plots just fine. If you need something more powerful, go download matplotlib. They have an example on their website for integrating matplotlib with wxPython. There is also an article or two on the wxPython wiki about matplotlib.
you can use matplotlib
there's lot of examples how embedding matplotlib figure in wxpython
I currently have a GUI built in wxPython with several sections, one of which displays a .png image of a plot:
self.plot = wx.BitmapButton(self.pane_system, -1, wx.Bitmap("/home/myname/projects/newton/plot/src/graph.png", wx.BITMAP_TYPE_ANY))
In another part of the GUI, there is a place where I can edit parameters. The current setup is that When I change the parameters and press enter, the code tells Gnuplot to re-plot and save the new plot to the graph.png file, then update the GUI to show the updated image.
I have several general questions:
I want to migrate gnuplot to matplotlib for the following reason: If I use gnuplot, the machine that is running the executable must have gnuplot installed on their machine. On the other hand, matplotlib is a python module, so I don't have to worry about installing graphical packages on the other machines. Is this assumption correct?
How can I modify my wxPython GUI window to show the matplotlib plot? I found tutorials several telling me how to create a new panel with a matplotlib plot, but I would like to simply have it appear where the old plot was. I think I can make matplotlib save the plot to an image file just as I did in gnuplot. Is it generally a good idea to save the plot as an image and update the GUI, or are there other (faster) best practices for updating plots? One drawback of using image files (as in the above code) is that they do not resize when I resize the GUI window.
If I package this as an executable, will I have to install wxPython/Python on a Windows machine to make the executable run?
Taking your questions in order:
1.) Yes matplotlib is a contained python module. It does have external dependancies but in Windows these dependencies are packaged with the matplotlib install. Do you need to worry about these when you install on other machines? That depends on how you are going to install. Are you packing to an exe? Having the end users install Python and matplotlib? As an example you can package matplotlib into your exe with py2exe, see here. Of course you'll have to customize those scripts for your backend, wx.
2.) You are seeing the panels with plots because matplotlib provides the FigureCanvasWxAgg, which is a wxWidget derived from wxPanel that plays nice with matplotlib. The advantages of using it are that you can set handlers for stuff like resize and painting.
Your wxBitMapButton, though is looking for a wxBitmap for the image. You might be able to give it a file handle (cStringIO.StringIO) to a matplotlib plot and eliminate the need to write a file to disk. You also could probably hook it's resize event and get matplotlib to redraw the figure to the appropriate size. You aren't going to have the amount of flexibility as using the FigureCanvasWxAgg. I can't research any of this, though, as it seems the wxPython web-site is down.
3.) You can package wxPython into executable. How depends on what packager you are using. I've done this with py2exe many times.
Is it possible to use any chart modules with wxpython? And are there any good ones out there?
I'm thinking of the likes of PyCha (http://www.lorenzogil.com/projects/pycha/) or any equivalent. Many modules seem to require PyCairo, but I can't figure out if I can use those with my wxpython app.
My app has a notebook pane, and I'd like to place the chart inside it. The chart has to be dynamic -- ie the user can choose what kind of data to view -- so I'm guessing modules that make chart images are out.
Just for clarity, by charts I mean things like pies, lines and bars etc.
I recently revisited matplotlib, and am pretty happy with the results.
If you're on windows, there are windows installers available to make your installation process a little less painful.
One potential drawback though is that it requires numpy to be installed.
I don't have experience with the interactivity of it, but it does support event handling.
matplotlib does embed quite well in wxpython. I have only used it in Tkinter, which went smoothly for me. I like the optional toolbar that allows direct manipulation of the plot (resizing and panning and such)
Use matplotlib. It integrates nicely with wxPython. Here's a sample of an interactive chart with wxPython and matplotlib.