Tutorial-06: Package Customisation

First we’ll look at the tprc.yaml, which can customise how ThermoParser behaves, and then how you might expand it.

tprc.yaml

tprc.yaml is a configuration file which allows you to customise many aspects of ThermoParser. A template is provided in the top directory, but to use it it must be saved as ~/.config/tprc.yaml. The file is basically a dictionary. If you prefer your own style sheet, you can set it as default by setting style: yourstyle, and the same for large_style, which will need a larger font size. To change the number of ticks on an axis, you can change the locator, e.g. to get a maximum of five major ticks, with 10 minor ticks each you would do:

locator:
    major: 5
    minor: 10

The quantity aliases, conversions, units and kwargs are all nested dictionaries like the locators. The aliases are listed as:

to_xxx:
    alias: xxx_name

If you add unit conversions, remember to update the units and labels too! An example has been provided for converting from S m^-1 to S cm^-1 here. There are six labels dictionaries. long_, medium_ and short_labels contain the actual labels of those lengths, while labels, inverted_labels and large_labels point to which of those you would like to default to for small, inverted and large axes, respectively. For example, if you prefer to put a inverted DoSs in a separate axes rather than a DoS axes, you may want to set inverted_labels: long. Finally, there are the default kwargs for each function, which are passed to the matplotlib plotting function, such as plt.plot. These override defaults set in the ThermoParser plotting function, but are overridden by arguments specified by the user (in the Python inteface, extra arguments will be passed on to the underlying matplotlib plotting function).

Extending ThermoParser

Due to its modular nature, extending ThermoParser should be relatively easy. So long as it reads or writes data in the standard ThermoParser format, a function can be added to a module without having to worry about conflicts with the rest of the code. The exception are the settings.py and tprc.yaml, which may need extra labels, kwargs, etc. if a new function is added elsewhere. We welcome contributions!