matplotlib-devel Mailing List for matplotlib

Jeff, John,

I have committed to CVS a set of changes that fix the recent bug in 
contourf when called with the colors kwarg, and that I hope will make 
contour.py and everything that uses it easier to understand and use. 
The CHANGELOG entry is:

2005-09-25 contour.py modified to use a single ContourSet class
            that handles filled contours, line contours, and labels;
            added keyword arg (clip_ends) to contourf.
            Colorbar modified to work with new ContourSet object;
            if the ContourSet has lines rather than polygons, the
            colorbar will follow suit. Fixed a bug introduced in
            0.84, in which contourf(...,colors=...) was broken - EF

and the API_CHANGES entry is:


     Changed the internal structure of contour.py to a more OO style.
     Calls to contour or contourf in axes.py or pylab.py now return
     a ContourSet object which contains references to the
     LineCollections or PolyCollections created by the call,
     as well as the configuration variables that were used.
     The ContourSet object is a "mappable" if a colormap was used.

     Added a clip_ends kwarg to contourf. From the docstring:
              * clip_ends = True
                If False, the limits for color scaling are set to the
                minimum and maximum contour levels.
                True (default) clips the scaling limits.  Example:
                if the contour boundaries are V = [-100, 2, 1, 0, 1, 2, 
100],
                then the scaling limits will be [-100, 100] if clip_ends
                is False, and [-3, 3] if clip_ends is True.

     Changed Figure.colorbar():
         kw argument order changed;
         if mappable arg is a non-filled ContourSet, colorbar() shows
                 lines instead of polygons.
         if mappable arg is a filled ContourSet with clip_ends=True,
                 the endpoints are not labelled, so as to give the
                 correct impression of open-endedness.

     Changed LineCollection.get_linewidths to get_linewidth, for
     consistency.

-----------------------------------

The change in contour and contourf output breaks basemap.  I have made 
the necessary changes in my working copy; the diff against CVS is 
attached.  If it is OK with you, Jeff, I will commit this change.  Or if 
you would rather make the modifications yourself, let me know.

What all this implies is that the next time there is a release of mpl 
there needs to be a simultaneous basemap release, and users will need to 
be warned to update both.

Eric