Getting Matplotlib's GTK Agg backend to respect user theming

I'm writing a PyGTK/Twisted app that uses Matplotlib for graphing. It's easy enough to embed the plots in my widgets using the FigureCanvasGtkAgg, but I notice that the background col开发者_如何学Goour of the canvas (outside the plot area itself) does not match that for the rest of my application, and neither does the font (for labels, legends, etc).

Is there a simple way to get my graphs to respect the user selected GTK theme?

You can set it by, for example pylab.figure(facecolor=SOME_COLOR, ...) or matplotlib.rcParams['figure.facecolor'] = SOME_COLOR. It looks like that its default value is hard-coded, so there is no way to tell MPL to respect GTK theme.

Here's a concrete example of how to do this in PyGTK. Some of this information here was gleaned from "Get colors of current gtk style" and from the gdk.Color docs. I haven't gotten as far as setting the font, etc, but this shows the basic framework you need.

First, define the following function:

def set_graph_appearance(container, figure):
    """
    Given a GTK container and a Matplotlib "figure" object, this will set the
    figure background colour to be the same as the normal colour of the
    container.
    """
    # "bg" is the background "style helper" object. It contains five different
    # colours, for the five different widget states.
    bg_style = container.get_style().bg[gtk.STATE_NORMAL]
    gtk_color = (bg_style.red_float, bg_style.green_float, bg_style.blue_float)
    figure.set_facecolor(gtk_color)

You can then connect to the realize signal (maybe also the map-event signal, I didn't try) and re-colour the graph when the containing widget is created:

graph_panel.connect('realize', set_graph_appearance, graph.figure)

(Here, graph_panel is a gtk.Alignment and graph is a subclass of FigureCanvasGTKAgg that has a figure member as needed.)