I think that the current direction is very encouraging. PDL::Graphics::Gnuplot for hooking into a standard and capable external plotting engine (oh, if only it was a library!) and PDL::Graphics::Prima for a native and cross platform system we can control and develop. Both being under the umbrella of PDL::Graphics::Simple is a great goal, bringing consistency of writing demos and ease of use for new PDLers.
Personally I think ::Simple should do almost nothing more than draw a few simple types of plots, with minimal features. Certainly that wouldn't be a publication-production-level interface, but I think that will make it easiest to keep the interface clean and compatible, necessary for demonstrating PDL if not the full plotting capabilities of the underlying plotting modules. Those should be left to demos showing the plotting modules out from under the ::Simple umbrella. Just my $0.02. Cheers, Joel On Sun, Mar 3, 2013 at 9:04 AM, Henning Glawe <[email protected]> wrote: > 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 >
_______________________________________________ Perldl mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.jach.hawaii.edu/mailman/listinfo/perldl
