feature request: set figure sizes w.r.t. screen resolution

[a6073758]

Surprisingly, there is no backend-independent, nor OS-independent way of setting the size of a figure in units of the screen dimensions.

I think it should be possible to call e.g. figure(scrsize=[0,0,0.5,0.5]) to get a figure in the lower left quadrant of the screen, just like you specify axes dimensions w.r.t. to the current figure.

[pelson]

If you use TkAgg it is possible to "set the geometry" of the window using the created Tkinter master window, which is stored on the TkAgg Canvas instance of a figure (source http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/python/python/361055):

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
fig = plt.figure()
fig.canvas._master.geometry('900x800+0+0') 
plt.show()

This kind of functionality needn't live in matplotlib itself - it would make an excellent standalone project which can handle any of the primary matplotlib backends (not just TkInter).

There would be some work to make this screen resolution independent, but it is all doable - I think it would be really useful functionality and already I am thinking of some of the cool things you could do with it (e.g. pass a list of figures and have them arranged in a tiled or cascaded form on screen).

The only sticking point with all of this is that I'm just not convinced that matplotlib has enough developer cycles to take this on as well as developing and maintaining an already bulging project. Hopefully this will spur you (or somebody else) to give this a go, as it sounds like an awesome project - but I'm going to close it as a mpl issue.

Thanks @a6073758