implement plotting module
Eothred opened this issue · comments
I was thinking that for novice users, a well structured plotting module based on matplotlib could be very useful. The scripts from @rdemaria found in https://github.com/pylhc/PyLHC would probably serve as a good source of inspiration.
If made interactive, would also be useful for expert users such as myself for sure.
I don't really think plotting should be part of this library (as I don't think it should be part of MAD-X either). IMO, this is a concern best kept seperated. Different users generally want different capabilities. matplotlib is already suited to be used with pymad: it is little effort to use (as the small example in the README demonstrates), it is extremly flexible and best of all: it doesn't bring the requirement to learn a new interface.
For more complex tasks I have started an independent GUI application myself. Eventually, this will be a notebook frame with a python shell tab and the capability to load user plugins. It already performs all calculations unit-aware (units might also be interesting for pymad!).
Note that, currently, it does not load any of the cern models, since it only looks for models in a specific setuptools.entry_point and requires the sequence to be available as JSON data file. I am using a python script to parse the sequence files as I haven't figured out how to read them from MADX memory.
EDIT: Sorry for sounding a bit too harsh. If you have a reasonable suggestion/concept I will be open-minded.
No problem, I think it these are valid arguments. I close this for now, but I might reopen at a later point.