Hi David. Not sure what you mean by there is no pipe interface for
Gnuplot. On Linux/Unix there certainly is piping supported. On the
windows side there is pgnuplot.exe that provides the piping capability.
There is a Perl Gnuplot interface that does allow basic formatting.
Gnuplot has a pretty decent output for both 2D and 3D, but I don't know
if it would support the interactivity that PGPlot has in the PDL
environment.
Cliff Sobchuk esn 361-8169, 403-262-4010 ext: 361-8169
Fax: 403-262-4010 ext: 361-8170
Core RF Support Engineer
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________________________________
From: David Mertens [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: February 8, 2010 1:16 AM
To: Craig DeForest
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [Perldl] 2D plots with TriD?
On Mon, Feb 8, 2010 at 12:54 AM, Craig DeForest
<[email protected]> wrote:
There are good reasons to adopt-and-fix something (be it PLPlot
or, say, Gnuplot) that already does high level formatting. There are
also good reasons to write a new interface layer from scratch.
I should be sleeping, but this comment got me to finally looking around
the web to see what's available. The list of C-libraries is smaller
than you'd expect, and there appear to be more Python graphing libraries
than C ones. Now that I've actually looked at it, I would honestly vote
that we go with PLplot. Other viable options that I found include
dislin, ncar graphcis, mathgl, and PGPLOT of course. If you want to
take a look, I had decent success googling (without quotes) 'c plotting
library.'
The reason I vote for PLplot is that I believe that it is a pretty
healthy open-source project (i.e. it should stick around for a while),
it's LGPL, it's already got PDL bindings, it has output-to-memory
(piddle), and it seems comparable to the other projects. Dislin is
apparently developed by one guy and has its own license - including a
paid license for commercial use - though it has lots of installers for
various systems. Ncar seems to have a spaghetti of licenses and may be
difficult to install, though it's supported by the National Center for
Atmospheric Research, so I don't imagine it's going anywhere any time
soon. MathGL looks really pretty, but it's only developed by a single
developer; it might be a good option for TIMTOWDI. PGPLOT requires a
fortran compiler and cannot be used in a commercial setting.
I don't think we'd want to use Gnuplot because I believe you must
communicate to it through a pipe. That is, there's no low-level
interface to Gnuplot, last I checked. If we're going that route, I'd
recommend Asymptote (for which I've already written a piping module!).
Our only problem with PLplot is getting it to build. That seems to me
to be an easier problem to solve than writing a whole new set of
bindings for Dislin, NCAR, or MathGL.
Just my 2c.
David
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