From octave-graphics-request at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu Fri Jan 24 03:21:48 2003
Subject: Re: 2D and 3D visualization tool for Octave.
From: Laurent Jacques <ljacques at fyma dot ucl dot ac dot be>
To: Ole Jacob Hagen <olehag_2001 at yahoo dot no>
Cc: octave-graphics at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu
Date: Fri, 24 Jan 2003 10:21:25 +0100

On Tuesday 21 January 2003 09:19, Ole Jacob Hagen wrote:
|  Hi, Octavers.
|
|  I'm a Zherlock-developer and we will implement a
|  2D/3D
|  plotting utility for handle graphics in Octave.
|  Our motivation is to have the same features as
|  Matlab
|  does, but even better. Link to Zherlock;
|  http://www.zherlock.org!
|
|  We're planning to use one of these visualization
|  toolkits; VTK, coin3d or OpenInventor which are all
|  Opensource. VTK can be found at
|  http://www.kitware.com, and coin3d can be found at
|  http://www.coin3d.org, while OpenInventor can be
|  found
|  at Silicon Graphics' website.
|  The decision about this is made during next week.
|
|  To ensure everybody that this is actually happing, I
|  say that we are a group of 9 developers in
|  Zherlock-project.
|
|  So, is there any questions and wishes for our
|  implementation?

That's a cool initiative. 

My personnal wishes is the ability of this tool to
- modify colormapping
- handle graphical objects with both command line and mouse pointer;
- add easily texts, boxes, arrows, ... to the figures
- understand multiplotting in the same figure
- rotate 3D representation and zoom with mouse
- return coordinates of a mouse click in figure
- export figure in eps, png, jpg, script to reproduce figure, svg, ...
- more difficult: transparency (alpha channel) to surface,  lighting,  

This is for sure a long list and all items are probably hard to program.
However, whatever is the toolkits you will choose, the important thing is the 
high responsivity of the gui. 

For instance, the Matlab gui (written in java. jvm ?) is really a pity under 
linux. It takes a long time to activate/delete objects or open menu (even on 
quick computer). It adds also a lot of bugs and segfault to Matlab. 

Good work ;-) and thanks for your project,
Laurent.