From maintainers-request at octave dot org Sun Oct 30 21:00:16 2005 Subject: Re: handle grapics with Document/View design From: Shai Ayal To: Paul Kienzle Cc: maintainers at octave dot org Date: Mon, 31 Oct 2005 04:59:09 +0200 A thought on the Document/Viewer approach to handle graphics: What should be left for the Viewer to do? This is a decision which will have quite an impact. How "smart" should the viewer be?I will demonstrate with an example: The viewer should be able to set the axis limits to allow for mouse zoom (an essential feature IMHO). But should the Viewer be exclusively responsible for the axis limits? will the command axis("auto") be preformed by octave or the viewer? should the tick mark locations (and labels) be decided by the viewer or octave? If you leave it to the viewer you will get different behaviour depending on the viewer. However doing it in octave means still more work ... Also, for gnuplot, the de-facto viewer it means duplicating on octave all it's "smart" features (such as axis limits and tics) and making it into a "dumb" viewer. In essence all octave will be using is gnuplot's terminals and none of it's other algorithms. If this is the way to go, I have already submit way back a contouring algorithms to replace gnuplot's contour, and I am willing to submit axis limits & tic algorithms from octplot once they become stable. Shai On 10/26/05, Paul Kienzle wrote: > > On Oct 25, 2005, at 8:23 PM, John W. Eaton wrote: > > > On 26-Oct-2005, Teemu Ikonen wrote: > > > > | The reason I'm asking is that I recently tried the python > > | package matplotlib, which I think would be an excellent plotting > > | backend also for Octave. > > > > I think that would be a nice addition. Does matplotlib do 3D plots? > > No, but the 2-D plots are gorgeous. There are performance issues > with pcolor, but I hope to have those addressed in the next couple > of months. > > There has been some effort put toward a VTK binding, but we already > have that with octaviz. > > - Paul > >