These examples use the matplotlib api rather than the pylab/pyplot

procedural state machine. For robust, production level scripts, or

for applications or web application servers, we recommend you use the

matplotlib API directly as it gives you the maximum control over your

figures, axes and plottng commands. There are a few documentation

resources for the API

- the matplotlib artist tutorial :

http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/pycon/artist_api_tut.pdf

- the "leftwich tutorial" -

http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/leftwich_tut.txt

The example agg_oo.py is the simplest example of using the Agg

backend which is readily ported to other output formats. This

example is a good starting point if your are a web application

developer. Many of the other examples in this directory use

matplotlib.pyplot just to create the figure and show calls, and use

the API for everything else. This is a good solution for production

quality scripts. For full fledged GUI applications, see the

user_interfaces examples.

matplotlib supports event handling with a GUI neutral event model. So

you can connect to matplotlib events w/o knowledge of what user

interface matplotlib will ultimately be plugged in to. This has two

advantages: the code you write will be more portable, and matplotlib

events are aware of things like data coordinate space and whih axes

the event occurs in so you don't have to mess with low level

transformation details to go from canvas space to data space. Object

picking examples are also included.

There is an event handling tutorial at

http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/pycon/event_handling_tut.pdf. The

ReST source for this document is included in the matplotlib source

distribution.

Embedding matplotlib in graphical user interfaces

=================================================

You can embed matplotlib directly into a user interface application by

following the embedding_in_SOMEGUI.py examples here. Currently

matplotlib supports wxpython, pygtk, tkinter, pyqt, fltk and cocoa.

When embedding matplotlib in a GUI, you must use the matplotlib API

directly rather than the pylab/pyplot proceedural interface, so take a

look at the examples/api directory for some example code working with

the API.