Hi all, no time to work on this at the office finally, i drafted this with lots of copy-pasting and re-arranging, from home (it's passed midnight now, time for bed). No time to put it in a POD file now. If no-one does i'll probably do it in a few weeks. I'd appreciate a feedback. Or if someone wishes to take over this little project and finish it, it's even better =o)
I hope this helps other PDL newcomers. Thank you for your explanations Craig, Chris and Joel (in your blog post commentary) Pierre PS: check my previous email (26th of March - same conversation thread as this email) for ideas of which other PDL documentation pages should link to this (potential) PDL::Graphics page. The main idea is to have this one central page of PDL::Graphics info page in one place, and then other pages refer to it. Details in my previous email. ~ ~ ~ Here we go : PDL::Graphics PDL has full-featured plotting abilities. Unlike MATLAB, PDL relies more on third-party libraries for its plotting features: Prima, Gnuplot, OpenGL, PLplot and PGplot. PDL has several plotting modules that you can choose from, here is a short guide: * Newest PDL::Graphics modules PDL::Graphics::Simple - unified backend-independent plotting interface for PDL Best for: Easiest to install (no external dependencies *** TODO: IS THIS TRUE ? ***). Backend-independent output. PDL::Graphics::Simple implements all the functionality used in the PDL::Book examples, and it will probably be the easiest PDL::Graphics module that you will install. Because it is backend-indendent, the plot you get will always be what you asked for, regardless of which plotting engine you have installed on your system. Only a small subset of PDL's complete graphics functionality is supported -- each individual plotting module has unique advantages and functionality that are beyond what PDL::Graphics::Simple can do. For example 2D plotting is supported, but 3D plotting is not. PDL::Graphics::Gnuplot Best for: publication-quality 2D and 3D plots Gnuplot is widely used and produces publication-quality plots. It is also interactive: you can pan, scale, and rotate both 2-D and 3-D plots. And its API is powerful, simple and intuitive. A video tutorial is available here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUXDQL3rZ_0 PDL::Graphics::Prima Best for : Integration of your plots into your application GUI. Possibility to create a dedicated GUI to let your application users interact with the plotted data. PDL::Graphics::Prima lets you focus on what you want to visualize rather than the details of how you would draw it. Its killer feature is that it belongs the the Prima GUI environment (an alternative to Tk, Gtk, Wx, etc). Prima provides an array of useful interactive widgets and a simple but powerful event-based programming model. These tools allow you to build interactive data visualization and analysis applications with sophisticated plotting and intuitive user interaction in only a few hundred lines of code. Or more simply, to include a plot into an application. For this reason, PDL::Graphics::Prima's API is more complex than PDL::Graphics::Gnuplot's. It is advised to start with PDL::Graphics Prima::Simple, which focuses on the plotting functions and does not mess with Widgets. A tutorial is available here: http://search.cpan.org/~chm/PDL-2.006/Demos/Prima.pm As well as a video tutorial here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUXDQL3rZ_0 PDL::Graphics::TriD Best for: Plotting heavy 3D images, fast. The native PDL 3D graphics library using OpenGL as a backend for 3D plots and data visualization. With OpenGL, it is easy to manipulate the resulting 3D objects with the mouse in real time. OpenGL makes PDL::Graphics::TriD a lot faster than Gnuplot to manipulate 3D images. But Gnuplot's output is publication quality, and someone told that Gnuplot it is easier to manipulate (*** TODO: IS THIS TRUE ? ***) (please check it out yourself). If you manipulate heavy images, PDL::Graphics::TriD might be the thing for you. * Older PDL::Graphics modules - still up, running, well maintained and widely used PDL::Graphics::PLplot Best for: Plotting 2D functions as well as 2D and 3D data sets. This is an interface to the PLplot plotting library. PLplot is a modern, open source library for making scientific plots. It supports plots of both 2D and 3D data sets. PLplot is best supported for unix/linux/macosx platforms. It has an active developers community and support for win32 platforms is improving. PDL::Graphics::PGPLOT Best for: Plotting 2D functions and data sets. This is an interface to the venerable PGPLOT library. PGPLOT has been widely used in the academic and scientific communities for many years. In part because of its age, PGPLOT has some limitations compared to newer packages such as PLplot (e.g. no RGB graphics). But it has many features that still make it popular in the scientific community. _______________________________________________ Perldl mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.jach.hawaii.edu/mailman/listinfo/perldl
