pelson

pelson

If working on XKCD style plotting for matplotlib taught me anything, it is that playing with software in a way that it was not originally designed to do can lead to some excellent discoveries (bugs) and generate new ideas and generalisations - not to mention it being a lot of fun!

So, in that vein, I wanted to put together a simple Christmas e-card using matplotlib. My main aim was to re-purpose some of the familiar matplotlib functionality to generate a simple festive animation.

I decided to go for a snowy scene, with a snow-capped greeting and sprig of holly. The snow is simply a scatter plot scaled by flake size and animated to fall in a pleasing way. The text is making use of the path effects functionality extended in v1.4 to add randomised "snow" around the text (the same effect employed by XKCD as it happens). And the holly is a nice demonstration of the power of Paths and vector rendering in matplotlib.

The source can be found at https://gist.github.com/pelson/ca795a02a420a1b9bfbc, and it requires m

pelson

pelson

from collections import namedtuple
import datetime


import matplotlib.dates as mdates
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import matplotlib.ticker as mticker
import matplotlib.transforms as mtransforms
import matplotlib.units as munits
import netcdftime

pelson

{
 "cells": [
  {
   "cell_type": "code",
   "execution_count": 1,
   "metadata": {
    "collapsed": true
   },
   "outputs": [],
   "source": [

pelson

pelson

diff --git IPython/kernel/kernelspec.py IPython/kernel/kernelspec.py
index 0df16c7..d2df218 100644
--- IPython/kernel/kernelspec.py
+++ IPython/kernel/kernelspec.py
@@ -1,7 +1,9 @@
 import io
 import json
+import glob
 import os
 import shutil

pelson

pelson

pelson