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From: | Daniel J Sebald |
Subject: | Re: graphics future |
Date: | Thu, 26 Apr 2007 02:48:11 -0500 |
User-agent: | Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20041020 |
John W. Eaton wrote:
Also, I simply don't have the cycles to be the maintainer of the graphics code. I took my best shot at the property database code for 2.9.10. If people think that is a reasonable design and someone would like to maintain and extend it, then OK. If not, then let's agree on something else that is maintainable, extensible, and (perhaps most importantly) compatible.
I thought it was fairly good. The hardest part seems to have been __go_plot_axes__ and that looks fairly straightforward. Speed seems an issue, but I too wonder if something happened between 2.9.5 and 2.9.6... Isn't this sort of near what has been proposed for quite a while, i.e., some routine that can be swapped in and out based upon the type of plotting platform that is desired? I could add little bits to the gnuplot version of __go_plot_axes__ when needed, but I can't be a full time developer.
There could be a main __go_plot_axes__ which may be internal, then several custom ones that could be swapped in using a link or whatnot. They could be part of octave-forge if not CVS.
It has to work on all platforms? Amenable to primitive manipulation of elements on its plot? Output in a variety of formats including PNG/JPG/EPS/PS/combined PS-LaTeX? GUI objects? That's a lot of work no matter what route one goes; probably full-time for two or three people for a year maybe. Graphics is fun in some ways, but not the livelihood of most list listeners.
Also, at this point, I think gnuplot as a graphics rendering backend is a dead end. I just don't think that gnuplot works well as a low-level plotter, and it is a lot of work to translate the property data into gnuplot commands and make it all (sort of) work out in a compatible way. In addition, I don't see much hope for being able to insert programmable GUI objects in a gnuplot graphics window and have the kind of two-way communication with Octave that is necessary to handle graphics and GUI features.
Gnuplot can return mouse coordinates upon clicking, but that is about it. Dan
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