Make a plotting-library

[haesleinhuepf]

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Hi all,

we were recently discussing how to make the plotting-code available to other napari-plugins and reuse code instead of copy&pasting it.

Today, napari-matplotlib was released. The base class in there might be pretty much a basic version of what we were discussing. Thus, before starting something, it might make sense to test if napari-matplotlib fulfills our needs and/or find out what's missing.

[jo-mueller]

I added two PRs to napari-matplotlib that, at the very least, make it compliant (style-wise) with what we are doing in the clusters plotter. In that sense, we could already use the base class from there to replace the code here.

For more advanced visualization, I think what we are looking for is very similar to what is discussed in this issue. The basic idea is to extend napari-matplotlib to be a viewer on layer.properties or layer.features.

We could, for instance:

• Create and visualize measurements in the Table from napari-skimage-regionprops
• Connect selecting columns in the Table Widget to visualization with napari-matplotlib
• Connect the lasso tools from the clusters plotter to the canvas provided by napari-matplotlib

and end up with the same functionality as we have right now but with considerably less code and hand-designed widgets :)

[Cryaaa]

@jo-mueller I really like this idea and I'm all for reducing the code in the plotting widget since this widget is the most difficult to read. Maybe as soon as we have a stable release of napari-matplotlib with the functionality you are suggesting we can start to integrate napari matplotlib into the cluster plotter

[haesleinhuepf]

We should wait until this is fixed:

• https://github.com/matplotlib/napari-matplotlib/issues/64