Relaxing sphinx dependency to install orbitize! for whereistheplanet

[gabrielastro]

Hello Sarah,

To install whereistheplanet, one needs orbitize!. I was getting ERROR: Cannot install orbitize, orbitize==3.1.0 and sphinx==7.1.2 because these package versions have conflicting dependencies. Hoping that sphinx is needed only for documentation building, which is definitely not in my plans, I took a chance to remove the version number in requirements.txt (sphinx>=6 → sphinx) and lo and behold, it installed fine and whereistheplanet works! Maybe the version requirement could be made optional, for those who want to develop the code, but not part of the standard installation?

Just a note in case it helps someone…

Best regards,

Gabriel

P.s.: If you have a chance, please look again at #378 😉!

[gabrielastro]

P.s.: Sorry for the missin' “g” in the title 😄!

[sblunt]

will be fixed in PR #389

[gabrielastro]

Very good, thank you! Nice also that you are putting a pyproject.toml file as this seems required for successful installation with uv, for example.

By the way, smplotlib now (since v1.0.0, wich came out more recently than #378) does a good job with just one line:

import smplotlib

and right away the plots should be better. (Honestly, I would make the axes slightly thicker, more similar to the characters.) As a check, I took minimal "Quick Start" example and ran that before the plot_orbits() call. Then doing:

orbit_figure.set_size_inches(10,6)
orbit_figure.savefig('test_SM.pdf', bbox_inches='tight')

yields:

The different font stands out but the important changes here are the minor and mirror ticks, and the point outlines help distinguish them. One could improve this by making the errorbars paler and the points and errorbars a bit transparent.

There is still the issue with the too-small text elements, and (almost?) all papers using orbitize! unfortunately suffer from this… Most people stay with the default settings, so it would be worth tweaking this. One thing which help might be to have "Epoch\n[year]" horizontally at the top, above a somewhat shortened colourbar; you would gain some space. Otherwise maybe "Epoch\n[yr]"… By the way, since many users are fitting planets, maybe the default symbol should be not a star but a circle 😉, which would also would reduce the clash with the errorbars.

In short, my suggestion for a useful default setting is to use this style, somehow moving the colourbar title (instead of making the canvas larger through set_size_inches to make everything fit). Users can then of course modify this!

[sblunt]

fixed in PR #389!