On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 4:59 PM, Werner Smekal <sme...@iap.tuwien.ac.at> wrote: > should we apply for Google summer of Code? > > http://code.google.com/soc/2008/ > > what we need are good ideas, mentors and students who are willing to > write code. > > Just an idea, this could be a chance to improve PLplot considerably.
I don't know if this would be outside of the scope of a Summer of Code project, but one of the TODO items I noticed when I started working with PLplot (thought I can't find it now) is making a switch from short integers to floating point values for the internal representation of data. This, or something to start progress toward this, may be a good (if large) project. It could focus on just the library internals and one output driver. Postscript may be a good target for a reference driver since it is currently used for output testing. The other drivers and plotting functions could be adapted after the SoC project if needed. A simpler project would be a suite of high-level functions: color bars, box and whisker plots, etc. Some more 3D plotting might be possible as well, such as a 3D plimage-like function or general 3D solids (examples from OpenDX at [1] and [2]). The ability to rasterize specific plot function(s) in vector file formats would be useful in some cases as well. Example 20 is a good case for this as, in its current form, its Postscript output is enormous. This process is fairly simple for Cairo devices (I've sent a separate email about this), but it would be nice if the non-Cairo PS, PDF and SVG devices could support this. I think the short to PLFLT (or some other float/double #define'd type) conversion would be quite useful and could potentially simplify areas of PLplot's internals. I don't know how realistic it would be to complete, or at least make a reasonable start, on a change like this. Hez [1] - http://www.opendx.org/inaction/weather/images/original/class4.jpg [2] - http://www.opendx.org/inaction/astronomy/images/original/radio_sphere.jpg -- Hezekiah M. Carty Graduate Research Assistant University of Maryland Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Science ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Open Source Business Conference (OSBC), March 24-25, 2009, San Francisco, CA -OSBC tackles the biggest issue in open source: Open Sourcing the Enterprise -Strategies to boost innovation and cut costs with open source participation -Receive a $600 discount off the registration fee with the source code: SFAD http://p.sf.net/sfu/XcvMzF8H _______________________________________________ Plplot-devel mailing list Plplot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-devel
