On Sun, Mar 03, 2013 at 10:04:45PM +1100, Karl Glazebrook wrote: > I don't know how 'modern' PLplot is. The documentation still talks about > Tektronix terminals! > > I did some googling, DISLIN seemed the closest but is only semi-frree. > > In astronomy people really only use pgplot at the c/f77 level. (At a higher > level they use language specific graphics, e.g. IDL, IRAF, Python, sm (!), > gnuplot, MMA). > > What about other scientific fields? What do people you know use?
In my field (computational quantum physics/chemistry), computation and visualization are usually treated separately. Typically, the actual numerical simulations are very heavy (taking CPU-days or even CPU-weeks on current HPC-Clusters). The visualization is performed in a separate step, where different "classes" of tools are employed: * Special purpuse tools for molecule/crystal visualization, which show: - crystal structures - densities either on cutting planes or as equipotential surfaces Tools belonging to this class are: - xcrysden http://www.xcrysden.org/ - v-sim http://www-drfmc.cea.fr/L_Sim/V_Sim/index.en.html * General-purpose plotting tools with a focus on 2D-visualization: - gnuplot http://gnuplot.sourceforge.net/ - grace http://plasma-gate.weizmann.ac.il/Grace/ * General-purpose plotting tools with more focus on 3D-visualization: - OpenDX http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_OpenDX (Official website seems to be down) Learning curve is quite steep, interface is a bit awkward to use (for modern standards) - paraview http://www.paraview.org/ Easier to use than OpenDX; very powerful visualization tool, integrated python scripting support for - sources (data generation) - filters (data processing) - general-purpose macros > Looks dismal. Perhaps the moral is people who put significant effort in to > visuals tend to go commercial? I don't think so. You can get quite good results out of free visualization tools, altough sometimes you may have to tweak the settings a bit. One very good example for this is gnuplot; the default settings have not changed much in the past 20 years (think backwards compatibility), but with some modifications in your gnuplot scripts, plots may look a lot more attractive. This is one of the websites showing how to do this: http://www.gnuplotting.org For paraview, there are some good examples in the image gallery: http://www.paraview.org/paraview/project/imagegallery.php Maybe we have to go back to the question what _kind_ of visualization support we need to have available directly within PDL. In my opinion, a very simple plotting interface used mainly for debugging/development is enough. For anything beyond this, there are really good plotting tools available also as free software, we just need to be able to export data in a format readable by them. -- c u henning _______________________________________________ Perldl mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.jach.hawaii.edu/mailman/listinfo/perldl
