From octave-graphics-request at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu  Thu May 27 11:28:11 1999
Subject: Re: GRACE as a plotting tool
From: Rafael Laboissiere <rafael at icp dot inpg dot fr>
To: Teemu Ikonen <tpikonen at pcu dot helsinki dot fi>
Cc: Octave Graphics Mailing List <octave-graphics at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu>
Date: 27 May 1999 18:28:07 +0200

>>>>> "TI" == Teemu Ikonen <tpikonen at pcu dot helsinki dot fi> writes:

    TI> On Wed, 26 May 1999, Jean-Marc.Valin wrote:

    TI> Yes, I for one am interested in making Octave's plotting capabilities
    TI> better. The default plotter, Gnuplot, isn't bad, but it lacks in
    TI> user-friendlines and has a bit ugly looking output, atleast with the
    TI> default settings, plus the license isn't GPL.

    TI> The plotting utility replacing Gnplot should at least have the
    TI> following:

    TI> [snip]

We had some brainstorm on these issues back in March on this mailing list.
Look at the archived messages in: 

    http://www.che.wisc.edu/octave/mailing-lists/octave-graphics/1999

Matthew Valenta <mvalenta at lycosmail dot com> started to compile a summary and
promised to put it on the Web.  I do not know whether this project was
pursued or not.

    TI> I took a quick look on the plotting packages available in Debian
    TI> Linux distribution, but none of them actually didn't seem to do any
    TI> better job than Gnuplot, except for a package called Plotmtv which
    TI> did have nice contour plots.

Did you look at PLplot?  There is even a octave-plplot package for Debian
(I am its maintainer), which is a drop-in replacement for Gnuplot.  I think
it is quite nice, but it has some drawbacks like no PostScript font
support.

    TI> I have personally been following the would-be official Gnome
    TI> plotting program Guppi, which isn't ready yet, but shows some
    TI> promise. Guppi should have a nice CORBA interface and is gui-based
    TI> and easy to use. High quality output is produced by Gnome printing
    TI> libraries. 

I stated some time ago my intention to develop a GTK+ driver for PLplot.
Of course, it can be a GTK+/Gnome driver, allying the graphing capabilities
of the PLplot library with the GUI/CORBA/Canvas capabilities of GTK+/Gnome.
I did not pursue this project because of the usual time budget limitation
problem...

    TI> Besides plotting, Gnome interface would be a nice thing if octave
    TI> developers want to implement Matlab -like gui functions some day...

John Eaton has quite precise plans regarding the future toolkit-independent
API for the GUI in Octave.  Look at the archive for the relevant messages.

--
Rafael