From graphics-request at octave dot org Sat Feb 18 12:42:10 2006
Subject: Re: Minimal requirements from a handle graphics package
From: Bill Denney <denney at seas dot upenn dot edu>
To: Shai Ayal <shaiay at gmail dot com>, graphics@octave.org, maintainers@octave.org
Date: Sat, 18 Feb 2006 13:40:35 -0500

Shai Ayal wrote:
>> And which M*lab version should our handle graphics package be compatible
>> with?
>> R11, R12, R13, R14? Mathworks has redesigned their handle graphics
>> package, from R13 to R14.
>>
>> Should we strive for R11 or R13 compatibility ?
>>     
> lets go for the version w/o the "group" objects.
>   
I would very much prefer to have the group objects (R14).  I personally 
think that matlab's group objects are somewhat broken (I can't assign a 
color to the group and have it propagate down to all sub-objects for 
example), but I think that it is one of the best and most powerful 
features of the new implementation.  It also allows for very good things 
such as having a single handle for errorbar plots; in R13 and before, 
two line handles were generated: one for the regular line and one for 
the error bars, but in R14, there is just one handle, but you can still 
get the granular control if you want by going to the children of the 
error bar group.

Groups are the most helpful aspect of the handle graphics to me, and for 
my purposes (most of my plots get turned into svg before going to eps 
for final printout), groups make later editing significantly easier (I 
can group together sets of lines and then modify them together in inkscape.

Bill