How to get pixel coordinates for Matplotlib-generated scatterplot?

Question

I use Matplotlib to generate PNG files of scatterplots. Now, for each scatterplot, in addition to a PNG file, I would also like to generate a list of pixel coordin

Answer 1

Doing this is fairly simple, but to understand what's going on, you'll need to read up a bit on matplotlib's transforms. The transformations tutorial is a good place to start.

At any rate, here's an example:

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

fig, ax = plt.subplots()
points, = ax.plot(range(10), 'ro')
ax.axis([-1, 10, -1, 10])

# Get the x and y data and transform it into pixel coordinates
x, y = points.get_data()
xy_pixels = ax.transData.transform(np.vstack([x,y]).T)
xpix, ypix = xy_pixels.T

# In matplotlib, 0,0 is the lower left corner, whereas it's usually the upper 
# left for most image software, so we'll flip the y-coords...
width, height = fig.canvas.get_width_height()
ypix = height - ypix

print 'Coordinates of the points in pixel coordinates...'
for xp, yp in zip(xpix, ypix):
    print '{x:0.2f}\t{y:0.2f}'.format(x=xp, y=yp)

# We have to be sure to save the figure with it's current DPI
# (savfig overrides the DPI of the figure, by default)
fig.savefig('test.png', dpi=fig.dpi)

This yields:

Coordinates of the points in pixel coordinates...
125.09  397.09
170.18  362.18
215.27  327.27
260.36  292.36
305.45  257.45
350.55  222.55
395.64  187.64
440.73  152.73
485.82  117.82
530.91  82.91

Answer 2

Try annotation box : http://matplotlib.org/examples/pylab_examples/demo_annotation_box.html

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from matplotlib.offsetbox import TextArea, DrawingArea, OffsetImage, \
     AnnotationBbox

for (x, y), m, c in zip(points, markers, colors):
    ax.scatter(x, y, marker=m, c=c, s=SIZE, vmin=VMIN, vmax=VMAX)

    for px, py in zip(x,y):
        offsetbox = TextArea( " %s, %s" (px, py ) , minimumdescent=False)
        ab = AnnotationBbox(offsetbox,(px, py ),
                        xybox=(-20, 40),
                        xycoords='data',
                        boxcoords="offset points",
                        arrowprops=dict(arrowstyle="->"))
        ax.add_artist(ab)

I don't have matplotlib installed on my current computer, so my code might not work.