Re: [Matplotlib-users] facecolor and edgecolor

> Alan G Isaac wrote:
>> I'm not understanding facecolor and edgecolor. 
>> In the code below (on Windows, with TkAgg)
>> I get the facecolor displayed [onscreen] but not the 
>> edgecolor, and the saved figure shows *neither*.  Why?  
>> (version is 0.98.1)


On 5/5/2009 2:48 PM Eric Firing apparently wrote:
> It looks to me like a bug plus a feature.  The bug is that in the screen 
> display, the edgecolor can get lost, presumably clipped.  On my system 
> (linux, gtkagg) the edgecolor is visible only along the top. 

> The feature is that by design, the figure edgecolor and facecolor have 
> to be specified separately for saving versus screen display.  This 
> prevents the screen default grey background from being printed.  Maybe 
> there needs to be a savefig option, possibly set via rcParams, to defeat 
> this behavior and simply use the screen settings. At present, you can 
> set the savefig colors in rcParams or via savefig kwargs.  Is this adequate? 



OK, we agree that edge color can be lost in onscreen
display, apparently a bug in figure clipping.

Now for the "feature".

I did notice that savefig takes keyword args allowing
us to set facecolor and edgecolor.  I would call this
"adequate" in some sense, but it is confusing.  It is too
implicit;  I was not able to easily determine why may
changes to the **figure** did not affect the file.  (Note
that I may not even view an onscreen display for some figures.)

So I do not think it is a problem that the screen display
and savefig have different defaults, presumably invoked but
a default of None.  But if the user sets the figure values,
this should override the defaults (in both cases).
Does that seem right?

Thank you,
Alan