René's URL Explorer Experiment

{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"DiscussionForumPosting","headline":"layout.grid enhancements for plotly.py to replace make_subplots","articleBody":"### Background\r\nplotly.py has a system for building figures with subplots that predates the plotly.js `layout.grid` system for subplots.  I would like to replace this custom subplot system with `layout.grid` to reduce complexity inside plotly.py and add support for all trace types (plotly.py's system only supports Cartesian subplot types).  This transition will also make the integration of `px` into plotly.py much smoother.\r\n\r\n### Needs\r\nAs far as I can tell, there are two features that are implemented in plotly.py's `make_subplots` function that are not supported by layout.grid.  \r\n\r\nThe first two are both demonstrated in this example https://plot.ly/python/subplots/#custom-sized-subplot-with-subplot-titles.\r\n\r\n 1) Spanned subplots:  `make_subplots` allows individual axes to span multiple subplot grid entries\r\n 2) Subplot titles: `make_subplots` has a system for positioning text annotations as titles for individual subplots\r\n 3) column/row widths: `make_subplots` supports `column_width` and `row_width` arrays to support non-uniform widths of the rows and columns in the grid.\r\n 4) insets: `make_subplots` supports the specification of insets.  TBH I'm not really sure how this works and I don't know if there are any examples of this outside of the docstring.  And this might not be something that makes sense to support in `layout.grid`.  Here's the docstring\r\n\r\n```\r\n    insets (kwarg, list of dictionaries):\r\n        Inset specifications.\r\n\r\n        - Each item in 'insets' is a dictionary.\r\n            The available keys are:\r\n\r\n            * cell (tuple, default=(1,1)): (row, col) index of the\r\n                subplot cell to overlay inset axes onto.\r\n            * is_3d (boolean, default=False): flag for 3d scenes\r\n            * l (float, default=0.0): padding left of inset\r\n                  in fraction of cell width\r\n            * w (float or 'to_end', default='to_end') inset width\r\n                  in fraction of cell width ('to_end': to cell right edge)\r\n            * b (float, default=0.0): padding bottom of inset\r\n                  in fraction of cell height\r\n            * h (float or 'to_end', default='to_end') inset height\r\n                  in fraction of cell height ('to_end': to cell top edge)\r\n```\r\n\r\n### API ideas\r\nTo kick things off, here's a idea for a potential plotly.js API\r\n\r\n 1) We could add `layout.grid.rowspan` and `layout.grid.colspan` properties that may optionally be set to 2D arrays of integers.  So the example above would have a a `colspan` property of\r\n\r\n```\r\n[[1, 1],\r\n [2, 0]]\r\n```\r\nwhich would imply a `grid.subplots` property of \r\n```\r\n[['xy'  , 'x2y2'],\r\n ['x3y3', null]]\r\n```\r\n\r\n2) We could add a `grid.titles` property that is a 2D array of title strings.  So the example above would have a `grid.titles` property of\r\n```\r\n[['First Subplot', 'Second Subplot'],\r\n ['Third Subplot' , null]]\r\n```\r\n\r\n3) We could add `grid.widths` and `grid.heights` properties that would be 1D arrays of numbers.  We could internally normalize each array and use the elements to determine the width/height of each column/row.\r\n\r\ncc @nicolaskruchten ","author":{"url":"https://github.com/jonmmease","@type":"Person","name":"jonmmease"},"datePublished":"2019-02-02T13:52:08.000Z","interactionStatistic":{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":"https://schema.org/CommentAction","userInteractionCount":5},"url":"https://github.com/3507/plotly.js/issues/3507"}