From owner-octave-sources at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu  Sun Mar 16 17:25:09 1997
Subject: whatever happened to plplot?
From: John Utz <spaz at u dot washington dot edu>
To: octave-sources at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu
Date: Sun, 16 Mar 1997 15:25:07 -0800 (PST)

Hi everybody;

	well having returned from yet another frustrating adventure with
gnuplot, i wanted to pick up on a thread that sort of faded out about ohh,
it seems about 18 months ago....

	at one time, in the pre-2.0 snapshots, jwe was shipping a copy of
plplot with the snapshots, then he decided that he was not going to bother
anymore because he did not have time to fool with it.

	At the time, he said that he wanted to use plplot because he
didn;t like the terms of the license for it's comparable competitor,
pgplot. Well, i looked at plplot's license last night and it is not
exactly what i would call liberal either! I seem to recall that it was pd
at one time, but now it is not.

	hokay, so where does this leave us? i for one am *really* eager to
do something else. Vinyak Dutt sp? has doen alot of really nice work to
get some really key functionality working, but i am still not able to do
really important things like multiplot in 3d. At this point, one ( meaning
me! ) could invest some time in fixing gnuplot, but, heck, it is really
not meant to be a plotting library! So every time we invoke it we are
engaging in serious hackery. And while this fact has been substantially
mitigated by vd's multiplot m files and the progress in the gnuplot
beta's, it can really bite one on the rear end sometimes! Try modeling a
few charge distributions with a surface plot and contoursand then try and
put them all on one plot...icckky!!

	The other option that i should mention is the work that ...arg, i
forget who..niles? ... i hate misattributing hard work! did to integrate
plotMTV. That ain't bad, and it seems to do a much better job with
surfaces, but it is still a standalone plotter, eating up swap.

	Ok, here is what i am asking. What would we *like* to use? I think
that a requirement would be for the library to be either pd ( best ) or
a gpl or lgpl ( not so hot, but it is the same as octave, so... ). IMHO, i
would rather work with a somewhat lame product in the pd as opposed to an
adequate product with a gpl, but i am starting with a clean sheet of
paper, so....

	What i propose is this, let's try and revisit the plotting library
choices. I have a personal project ( an interactive waveform development
program, commonly known as a patch editor in music software parlance )
that i wish to develop. I want to use a lib for the plotting routines. If
a consensus builds for a particular plotting lib, then i will use it on
this project and then use that experience to start working on octave's
plotting routines.

	Of course, if somebody has had something else going on that they
are ready to share, well then, i'd certainly be willing to give it a try.

thanks for any input! and thanks for reading!

john

*******************************************************************************
 John Utz	spaz at u dot washington dot edu
	idiocy is the impulse function in the convolution of life