Re: Plotting status in Octave

[Jonathan Stickel]

On 10/19/08 address@hidden wrote:
> Date: Sat, 18 Oct 2008 14:40:46 -0500
> From: " Jordi Guti?rrez Hermoso " <address@hidden>
> Subject: Plotting status in Octave
> To: "octave maintainers mailing list" <address@hidden>
> Message-ID:
>         <address@hidden>
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>
> I seem to have lost track of what's been happening with plotting in
> Octave. I know Shai Ayal and Michael Goffioul were doing a lot of
> work[1] towards moving away from gnuplot, and I remember some efforts
> to move their merges from octave-graphics into main. What happened to
> this?
>
> And remember MathGL[2]? It looks very pretty. Is it going to be a part
> of Octave?
>
> I am *very* interested in getting high-quality 3d plots into Octave.
> In fact, nowadays my primary use of Octave is for post-processing and
> producing nice-looking plots. Octaviz has produced the best-looking 3d
> plots for me so far, but it's abandoned upstream and I now agree with
> Thomas Weber's opinion that combining VTK and Octave is too much work
> and too resource-intensive. Compiling Octaviz requires compiling all
> of VTK with some flex and bison arcana that I am unable to debug.

As much as I love VTK/Octaviz, I have recently reached the same 
conclusion.  I would gladly continue to develop the frontend (m-file 
functions) of Octaviz, but with Dragan gone and no other c++ guru to 
debug the internals of Octaviz, I am afraid it is dying (or already 
dead).  I guess the best way to use octave and VTK together in the long 
term is to save data from octave and write VTK scripts/programs to 
generate the plots using the saved data, as I have done in the past.


> I'd appreciate a quick summary of what's been going with plotting in
> Octave so I have an idea of where to start thinking of directing my
> attention.

Reiterating Jordi, what is the best way for me to get involved with 
improving Octave's 3D plotting capabilities?

Thanks,
Jonathan