On 2/6/2010 12:35 AM, David Mertens wrote: > I am thinking a lot lately about cross-platform plotting, a perennial > favorite on this list, no doubt. Back in 2006, the TriD package was > described by Christian as 'effectively orphaned'. Perhaps it was in > response to this that Chris took up POGL and TriD? Anyway, it seems > to be working for me (on my laptop, though not quite on my desktop) > and I assume it's working for Chris on Windows.
It works on cygwin and win32. I look forward to hearing about the additional debugging you've tried on your desktop. > > This means that at the moment, OpenGL may be our best contender for > cross-platform graphics. Agreed per previous discussions. > I would like to believe that PLplot is our best contender for > cross-platform 2d plotting, but a few days ago I tried installing it > on a Windows virtualbox with Strawberry Perl and it failed. Is this installing the PLplot library on windows or the perl or PDL PLplot modules? If the latter, it would be nice if you would document how to install on a win32 platform such as MinGW that can be used with Strawberry Perl or ASPerl. I believe that PLplot could be made to install on win32 native (with MinGW) or under cygwin if things could be worked out. The last time I tried there were a whole bunch of DLLs that were needed for the build to complete on cygwin and paths had to be set to pull them in but you had to figure out where they were. It seems like that is a problem with the cmake build but I don't know cmake and have not had time to try to work through the issues. Once the PLplot library is installed, the next step is the installation of the PLplot module or the PDL::Graphics::PLplot. That should work as well but there may be config issues that need to be addressed there too. > Then it occurred to me: couldn't we get some sort of rudimentary > cross-platform 2d plotting if we could suppress the z-axis, and > changed the twiddling behavior? It wouldn't be publication quality, > but it's better than nothing. Yes, but, once available, folks will [I predict] start asking for extra functionality leading down the road to implementing publication quality graphics, i.e. pgplot or plplot or equivalent. Far easier would be to get the PLplot library working with the mem interface and then using OpenGL to manipulate that. What has been discussed before was to implement an OpenGL driver for PLplot which I feel that I could put together quickly if only I had a working PLplot on cygwin and win32 which are my two development platforms at the moment. The driver approach would allow for interactive plotting a la xserve in pgplot as well as supporting transparency and anti-aliasing. > I'm working through PDL's code base slowly. I'll get to it > eventually, if somebody doesn't beat me to it. Just thought I'd throw > the idea out. Implementing a working 2D plotting routine is lots of work. Even the basics are difficult to get right (as in robust and flexible). Starting from PLplot would probably take much less effort and complete sooner since the most difficult part is getting the PLplot library to build on win32 and cygwin which is mostly configuration and cmake work that could be done in iterations with the PLplot developers. --Chris _______________________________________________ Perldl mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.jach.hawaii.edu/mailman/listinfo/perldl
