> I am interested in creating graphs where I can interact with the data
> plotted in the graph.
>
> For example, suppose I plot the heat of formation of ~ 80 different alloy
> structures (which each have a name) against the composition of each
> structure. What I would like is to hold the mouse over a data point and
> see a balloon pop up that displays the crystal structure name, or to left
> click on a data point to launch a structure viewer for the structure at
> that point, or right click to get a menu of different options, or to press
> "f" to see what filename the data for that point is saved in, etc...
>
> Another example would be a graph of many lines, where each line
> corresponds to a structure. Then I would want to click on the lines to do
> various things.
>
> Sometimes the data is very dense, so it would also be nice if you could
> move the focus to different points by tabbing or using the arrow buttons.
>
> It would be interesting to be able to select portions of data points to do
> some kind of analysis on, or to modify their appearance someway, maybe
> change symbol the size according to atomic volume, or color according to
> some property, etc.
>
> Could these kinds of things be done in/with matplotlib? Or more
> importantly, does a framework in matplotlib exist that this kind of thing
> could be developed? I am interested in talking to anyone who has thoughts
> about this.
I use a really nice application called PyMca at work for analyzing x-ray
fluorescence spectra. The gui is built with PyQt, and the author is
considering replacing PyQwt with matplotlib. PyMca also needs to be able to
interact with the plot, specifically to draw markers or lines and move them
around with the mouse.
I have just started to think about this, and would appreciate any thoughts on
how to approach the problem of interacting with data in the plot window. It
seems like it might involve some pretty significant time and effort.
Darren
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