Chapter 5. Embedding Matplotlib in GTK+

We have seen a lot of examples so far, and we are now pretty productive with Matplotlib and the IPython interpreter.

While this is very handy for interactive plotting, experimenting with datasets, trying different visualization of the same data, and so on, there will be cases where we want an application to acquire, parse, and then, display our data.

In this chapter, we will present some examples of how to embed Matplotlib in applications (quite simple ones) that use GTK+ as the graphical interface library. While doing this, we will show how using the Matplotlib API to program these examples is the best way to achieve this goal.

We will see the following in detail:

• How to embed a Matplotlib Figure into a GTK+ window

• How to embed both, Matplotlib Figure and a navigation toolbar into a GTK+ window

• What does GTK+ provide to update a Matplotlib graph in real-time

• How we can use Glade to design a GUI for GTK+ and then embed Matplotlib into it

A brief introduction...