From graphics-request at octave dot org Tue Jul 13 21:30:12 2004
Subject: Re: Matplotlib
From: Paul Kienzle <pkienzle at users dot sourceforge dot net>
To: David Bateman <David dot Bateman at motorola dot com>
Cc: graphics at octave dot org
Date: Tue, 13 Jul 2004 22:29:00 -0400

All in all, very pretty.

I like the fact that it can do some math layout in labels, even
if it isn't the highest quality.  It is a bit slow to render them 
though.

The image related stuff is slow, but I think that is higher
up in the processing, and not in the display itself.  I started
tracing through it a couple of months ago to figure out why,
but ran out of time.

It's not clear that it already handles Tk canvas like operations.
The simplest of these is determining where the mouse was
clicked, but it gets really useful if you can also determine what
line/point was clicked.  They could certainly use some direct
mouse actions for zoom and pan.

No surface, mesh or contour, so there is still a lot of work to do.
I don't think pdf output is finished.  I'm not sure what the status
of printing on windows is.

The line between processing and graphics has clearly been
crossed, particularly in the case of psd, cohere, etc.  I do like the
convenience of throwing up a plot if no return value is requested,
but I prefer a cleaner separation (do as I say, not as I do---my
own psd, cohere, etc., hard code the graphs, but I know better
now ;-)

- Paul

On Jul 13, 2004, at 4:43 AM, David Bateman wrote:

> Has anyone looked at the package
>
> http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/
>
> Which is a pretty much complete copy of the matlab plotting window. The
> good thine is that it seems to have a lot of vitality as the 
> sourceforge
> page rates its vitality not much lower than octave-forge (roughly 90%).
>
> It seems to me that octave could easily act as a backend to this 
> package,
> particularly as the CLI interface for this package aims to be matlab
> compatiable.
>
> Regards
> David
>
> -- 
> David Bateman                                David dot Bateman at motorola dot com
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