PyX — Example: path/at.py
Positions along a path
from pyx import * def mark(x, y): return path.circle(x, y, 0.1) c = canvas.canvas() p1 = path.curve(0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 2, 1) c.stroke(p1) c.fill(mark(*p1.atbegin())) c.fill(mark(*p1.at(0.5*p1.arclen()))) c.fill(mark(*p1.atend())) p2 = path.curve(3, 0, 4, 0, 4, 1, 5, 1) c.stroke(p2) c.fill(mark(*p2.at(p2.begin()+0.5))) c.fill(mark(*p2.at(p2.end()-0.5))) c.writeEPSfile("at") c.writePDFfile("at") c.writeSVGfile("at")
Description
There are several methods to access certain positions at a path. At first there are atbegin and atend methods, which return a coordinate tuple.
In this example, we have defined a small helper function mark to which we can pass the return value of the at... methods. We do this by transforming the sequence in to positional argument of the function call. This Python language feature is available by the * syntax in the call.
The coordinates returned by the at... methods are PyX lengths in the unscaleable true units similar to the return value of the arclen method.
For the left path p1, we also show how to use the at method, which can be used to get the coordinates of a certain point of the path depending on the arc length along the path.
A different use of the at function is shown for the right path p2: It is also possible to pass parametrization instances of the path to the at method. In the shown case we first fetch such parametrization instances for the beginning and the end of the path by the begin and end methods. Note that the atbegin method is equal to call at with the result value of the begin method (except for optimizations: atbegin is faster than the two calls). Similar atend could be rewritten using the result value of end. As shown in the example you can use the parametrization instances to add and substract arc lengths from selected point.
The at method of a path instance can not only handle a single value, in which case it returns a single result tuple. You can also pass a list to the method and the return value will contain a list of coordinate tuples. You should bear in mind that passing a list is much more efficient than multiple calls of the method performing single conversions at each time.