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scatter_matrix formatting considered harmful #1285
Description
Activity
Just adding that the spacing issue seems unrelated to the toolbar:
scatter_matrix(df, alpha=0.5, width=600, height=600, xrotation=0).opts(toolbar='above')
Reacted by James A. BednarJust adding that the spacing issue seems unrelated to the toolbar:
Yes, I think the spacing issues have been there for some time, while the toolbar issue is relatively recent, but I haven't tried to do a git bisect to pin that down.
Quick feedback:
- Toolbar issue: possibly introduced in Ignore Bokeh UserWarning for multiple active properties in toolbar holoviews#5873
- Subplots not aligned: happened sometime around the Bokeh 3 transition (not sure it's a Bokeh 3 problem either)
https://holoviews.org/reference/containers/bokeh/GridSpace.html
There may be no hvPlot issue at all.
Thanks. I've opened holoviz/holoviews#6126 for the toolbar issue, and @mattpap is looking at it from the Bokeh side.
Bad plot alignment is caused by fixed frame sizing (
Plot.frame_{width,height,align}), which works reliably only for single plots and doesn't work well in all other cases (see e.g. issue bokeh/bokeh#13225). I suppose it's time to implement this properly.From the initial list of issues:
- subplots all lined up: Mateusz indicated this is a Bokeh issue
- a single Bokeh toolbar for the entire figure: HoloViews issue fixed in Don't show figures toolbar on GridSpace holoviews#6127
- axis labels readable, text not overlapping
That leaves us with 3). The default Bokeh formatter is the
BasicTickFormatter:
Comparing that to the default of plotly express:
We can get a similar behavior defining a
NumericalTickFormatter:
However, it also has its limits:
Certainly, we could better document
xformatter/yformatter. But should we also consider defaulting to a more user-friendly formatter?any idea why the tick formatter didn't decide to drop the intermediate tick marks?
This is handled setting
Axis.major_label_policy = NoOverlap(). When this was implemented the default (AllLabels) was left for backwards compatibility. Tickers and tick formatters have no access to the screen space, so they can't make any adjustments based on the positioning of labels.- locked and limited conversation to collaborators
on May 11, 2025
ALL software version info
Python : 3.11.5 (main, Sep 11 2023, 08:31:25) [Clang 14.0.6 ]
Operating system : macOS-14.0-arm64-arm-64bit
Panel comms : default
holoviews : 1.18.3
bokeh : 3.3.4
colorcet : 3.0.1
dask : 2023.6.0
datashader : 0.16.0
geoviews : 1.11.0
hvplot : 0.9.2
IPython : 8.15.0
jupyterlab : 4.0.11
matplotlib : 3.8.0
notebook : 7.0.6
numba : 0.58.0
numpy : 1.24.3
pandas : 2.1.1
panel : 1.3.1
param : 2.0.1
pillow : 10.0.1
pyarrow : 11.0.0
pyviz_comms : 2.3.0
scipy : 1.11.3
spatialpandas : 0.4.9
xarray : 2023.6.0
Description of expected behavior and the observed behavior
I'd expect
scatter_matrixto be formatted reasonably: subplots all lined up, axis labels readable, text not overlapping, and a single Bokeh toolbar for the entire figure. That's not what's happening: