From octave-graphics-request at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu  Thu Feb 24 01:14:46 2000
Subject: Re: New on the list : new plotting tool
From: "John W. Eaton" <jwe at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu>
To: Teemu Ikonen <tpikonen at pcu dot helsinki dot fi>
Cc: Tim Piessens <Tim dot Piessens at esat dot kuleuven dot ac dot be>,         Discussion list octave-graphics <octave-graphics@bevo.che.wisc.edu>
Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 01:15:16 -0600 (CST)

On 22-Feb-2000, Teemu Ikonen <tpikonen at pcu dot helsinki dot fi> wrote:

| There are plenty of free programs for plotting now and more are on the
| way, for example Guppi (http://www.gnome.org/guppi/), which atleast looks
| promising (modern GUI toolkit, modular plugin-based architecture, language
| independent scripting (we could make bindings for octaves
| m-language) etc.). 

Does Guppi require gnome to work?  If so, it can't be the default
plotting package for use with Octave, since not all Octave users are
going to be using the gnome desktop.  Even if Guppi doesn't require
gnome, but only runs under X (or some other GUI), then it is not
likely that it could be adopted as the default plotting package, since
not everyone who uses Octave is using a GUI.

One nice thing about gnuplot is that it doesn't *require* a GUI to
operate, and it supports a lot of different types of output devices.

jwe