[yt-dev] Profile Plotting

[Matthew Turk]

On Mon, Dec 3, 2012 at 2:02 PM, Matthew Turk <matthewturk at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> As I noted in my other email, there was one major feature we'd talked
> about for yt 2.5 that we never even really worked on.  Nathan and
> others pushed really hard on rethinking and redesigning the way image
> plots were made and handled back in the 2.4 series, which eliminated
> the main use case for the PlotCollection.  However, the remaining
> firewalls on PlotCollection are the 1-D and 2-D phase plots.
>
> There's been broad consensus that we need a new method for doing this,
> analogous to how PlotWindow serves to replace "add_slice" and
> "add_projection" from the PlotCollection.  Something that gets out of
> the way and lets people modify their plots as they see fit.
>
> A while back I implemented a first pass at this, which you can see in
> yt/visualization/profile_plotter.py:
>
> https://bitbucket.org/yt_analysis/yt/src/711e95aff04b54e6ccda7dfefb0b0ae17c3830a7/yt/visualization/profile_plotter.py?at=yt
>
> The idea here is that you create an instance of ProfilePlotter or
> PhasePlotter, which then "Does the right thing" and creates the
> necessary data objects and the like.  This object can then either
> create its own axes+figure in matplotlib, or it can deposit itself
> into an existing axes object.  It includes axis objects and plot
> containers that know how to plot themselves.
>
> I don't know that I necessarily like how this is done.  It's very
> declarative, and step by step, but I think it could be easier.  Here's
> an example:
>
> https://hub.yt-project.org/go/vlilvw

That should read:

https://hub.yt-project.org/nb/vlilvw

>
> One thing I think *is* quite nice is that the *plot* object is
> independent of the profile itself.  This makes it easier to pickle and
> unpickle things, and is the reason for the existence of the various
> sub-objects off of ProfilePlotter.  This is useful for the use case of
> making very large datasets into profiles, pickling the resulting
> plots, and modifying them later.
>
> So here are my specific questions:
>
>  * Does this rough outline of how the object works seem good?  As in,
> making a plotter object, making it have a sub .plot object, and then
> dispatching that plot object to various backends?  (Probably nearly
> always matplotlib.)
>  * Should we add on additional convenience operations?
>  * How should it interface with existing profiles?
>  * Should implementing this and finalizing the design be a blocker for 2.5?
>
> I will create and update a YTEP with the resulting discussion from
> this.  Nathan, Jeff and Britton -- I would very much appreciate your
> feedback, as I know you have experience with (respectively) plot
> windows, matplotlib, and large datasets being profiled.
>
> -Matt