Ginga Canvas Graphics

This chapter describes the basic architecture of Ginga’s canvas-viewer-renderer model, and describes how to do graphics operations on canvases.

Canvases and Canvas Objects

Ginga’s canvas is based on the DrawingCanvas class. On the canvas can be placed a number of different kinds of canvas objects, including many geometric shapes. The set of canvas objects includes:

  • Text: a piece of text having a single point coordinate.

  • Polygon: a closed polygon defined by N points.

  • Path: an open polygon defined by N points.

  • Box: a rectangular shape defined by a single center point, two radii and a rotation angle.

  • Ellipse: an elliptical shape defined by a single center point, two radii and a rotation angle.

  • Triangle: an equilateral triangular shape defined by a single center point, two radii and a rotation angle.

  • Circle: a circular shape defined by a center point and a radius.

  • Point: a marker for a point defined by a single point and a radius for the “arms”.

  • Rectangle – a rectangular shape defined by two points.

  • Line – a line defined by two points.

  • RightTriangle – a right triangle defined by two points.

  • Compass – a compass defined by a point and a radius.

  • Ruler – a ruler defined by two points.

  • Crosshair – a crosshair defined by one point.

  • Annulus – an annulus defined by one point, a radius and a width.

  • Annulus2R – an annulus defined by one point, two radii and two widths.

  • Image – a raster image anchored by a point.

  • NormImage – a subclass of Image, with rendering done with the aid of a colormap, a color distribution algorithm (linear, log, etc), and defined low and high cut levels.

  • CompoundObject: a compound object combining a series of other canvas objects.

  • Canvas: a transparent subcanvas on which items can be placed.

  • DrawingCanvas: Like a Canvas, but also can support manual drawing operations initiated in a viewer to create shapes on itself.

  • ColorBar: a bar with a color range and ticks and value markers to help indicate the mapping of color to the value range of the data.

  • ModeIndicator: a small rectangular overlay with text indicating that the user has entered a special keyboard/mouse mode.

All canvas objects are subclasses of CanvasObjectBase and may also contain mixin classes that define common attributes or behavior. For example, Line, Ruler and RightTriangle are all subclasses of the mixin class TwoPointMixin.

Note

In most general canvas systems you can layer objects in any order. In Ginga there is an optimization of canvas redrawing that merges image bitmaps before updating other kinds of canvas objects. This means that while images can be stacked in any order, effectively you cannot have other objects appear underneath image objects. For most uses of the viewer this is not a big limitation.

Viewers

All Ginga viewers are subclasses of ImageViewBase. These objects implement a viewport onto a DrawingCanvas object. Each viewer contains a handle to a canvas and provides a particular view onto that canvas defined by:

  • dimensions of their viewport (i.e. the height and width of the native widget’s window into which the viewer is rendering),

  • scale in X and Y dimensions,

  • a pan position linking the center of the viewport to a canvas coordinate,

  • a transform consisting of possible flips in X, Y axes and/or swapping of X/Y axes, and

  • a rotation.

Two different ImageView-based viewers can share the same canvas handle, providing different views into the same canvas. Another typical arrangement for sharing is where each viewer has a private canvas, and on each private canvas is placed a shared transparent subcanvas, an arrangement which allows each viewer to have a mix of private and shared canvas objects. Another common idiom is to layer multiple DrawingCanvas objects to more easily manage multiple collections of overlaid graphics.

The various subclasses of ImageView are designed to render into a different widget set’s “native” canvas using a CanvasRenderer customized for that target.

Support for Astropy regions

Ginga provides a module for plotting Astropy regions shapes on canvases. To use this, import the ginga.util.ap_regions module and use one of the three module functions astropy_region_to_ginga_canvas_object, add_region, or ginga_canvas_object_to_astropy_region.

astropy_region_to_ginga_canvas_object takes a regions shape and returns a Ginga canvas object that most closely implements the shape. The object returned can be used like any Ginga canvas object: it can be used in a compound object, added to a canvas, etc. Assuming you have a viewer v and an Astropy region r:

from ginga.util import ap_region
obj = ap_region.astropy_region_to_ginga_canvas_object(r)
canvas = v.get_canvas()
canvas.add(obj)

add_region is a convenience method for both converting an object and adding it to a canvas.

ap_region.add_region(canvas, r)

ginga_canvas_object_to_astropy_region provides the reverse transformation, taking a Ginga canvas object and converting it to the closest representation as an Astropy region.

r = ap_region.ginga_canvas_object_to_astropy_region(obj)