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As many people here who do some scientific computing, I'm increasingly using Python as my main prototyping language in favor of MATLAB. A colleague of mine whose husband got me into Python approached me recently soliciting advice about graphics tools for TeX.

Having in mind her background, I recommended Matplotlib in-spite of the fact that I have never used it before. Feeling guilty about my recommendation, I started experimenting with Matplotlib and I am really loving it. So far, as previously stated, my taste when it comes to graphics tools in TeX was PostScript biased, but apart from few hand hacks on PostScript files necessary to get output from old Eastern European printers I have never got to program regularly in pure PostScript. On the other hand Python is a different story, and I am trying to use it on the daily basis.

Could anybody point me to an objective comparison of the graphical capabilities of Matplotlib and PostScript? I am particularly keen to see something of high quality like this post of Dr. Till Tantau, where in-spite of being TikZ main developer/inventor conceded that PostScript is still THE page description language to be reckon with.

Predrag Punosevac
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    on a side note i have found Matplotlib to be really slow when plotting large contours or 3D images. This is a huge limitation, where others such as Octave or GNUplot actually outperforms matplotlib... Other than that i really like matplotlib and its integration with numpy. – nickpapior Jan 03 '12 at 07:34
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    I am a bit confused by this. I do no quite see what is the connection with TeX. The way I read your question, you want to compare graphical capabilities of Python with Matplotlib with those of Postscript. Perhaps you would have a better chance of getting an answer if you posted this question on SO or SU? – Jan Hlavacek Jan 03 '12 at 14:51
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    I agree with the off-topic. I also read Till Tantau's post completely differently! I see it as "although PS is a better (graphics) output, there isn't a lot that pstricks can do that PGF can't". – Andrew Stacey Jan 09 '12 at 08:48

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