From owner-help-octave at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu Mon May 26 14:45:56 1997 Subject: Re: PGPLOT From: Phil Austin To: "John W. Eaton" Cc: help-octave at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu Date: Mon, 26 May 1997 12:45:39 -0700 >>>>> "JWE" == John W Eaton writes: JWE> There are plans to improve Octave's plotting JWE> capabilities. Unfortunately, I've not had much time to work JWE> on this project yet. JWE> I don't plan to use pgplot, because apparently it is only JWE> freely available for non-commercial use. JWE> A similar library that is distributed under the GPL is JWE> plplot, but I'm not sure that it is being actively maintained JWE> these days. JWE> I also know of several other plotting packages, each with its JWE> own set of stregths and weaknesses. JWE> In any case, I intend to make Octave's internal plotting JWE> interface relatively generic so that it will be possible for JWE> users to different plotting packages if they wish. I plan to JWE> provide at least one sample implementation, but I'm still JWE> undecided about which plotting package I will use. Lack of a good free plotting package is a sticking point for several numerically-oriented interpreted languages. There has been some discussion of this on the Numeric Python mailing list as well, and perhaps a group effort spanning Octave, Python, Perl data language, etc. could produce something. We'd like to see the most portable possible solution, and the Tk driver in Plplot shows promise in that direction, although the move of Geoff Furnish, the Plplot maintainer, from Livermore to Los Alamos may have derailed that (there was also some talk several months about about merging Plplot with gist, a free Livermore graphics package that runs on X under Yorick or Python). One person on the Python list is writing plotting software in Java to run under Python (see http://estel.uindy.edu/PESSci/ph280/) Phil Austin INTERNET: phil at geog dot ubc dot ca (604) 822-2175 FAX: (604) 822-6150 http://www.geog.ubc.ca/~phil Associate Professor Atmospheric Sciences Programme Geography #217 University of British Columbia 1984 W Mall Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z2 CANADA