Hazen, Ideally, I would prefer a cross-platform solution, but the reality is that I work on Linux. Cairo appears to have installed vai apt-get; I have yet to do anything with it.
Where should I look for the memcairo driver? Bill ________________________________________ From: Hazen Babcock [hbabc...@mac.com] Sent: Monday, September 20, 2010 6:40 PM To: Schwab,Wilhelm K Cc: plplot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [Plplot-devel] plsmem(), RGB+alpha vs. RGB? Schwab,Wilhelm K wrote: > First, are any of you using plsmem() to obtain graphs w/o saving them to a > file? Encouragement in the form of success stories or warnings of trouble > spots would be greatly appreciated. > > Another question that has arisen come in the form of image formats readily > understood by the Smalltalk environment I am using, called Pharo and > available at http://pharo-project.org/home. I am still struggling slightly > to understand the various twists, but it appears that it is willing readily > absorb images made up of RGB and an alpha value (4 bytes per pixel instead of > 3). > > If I am reading thing correctly, I could allocate an array of RGB values, let > PLplot draw on it, then use a C function to copy the memory into RGB+Alpha > array for Pharo. Could Smalltalk do the memory manipulation? Yes, but there > are usually great speed gains to be had by doing such looping in C, > regardless of the details of how that is accomplished. > > The question for you is whether adding an alpha value has any interest to the > future of PLplot? I think that an alpha value would be a fine addition to the memory (mem) driver, but the mem driver is pretty basic and unlikely to get improved much as we would just be duplicating functionality provided by a number of different 3rd party graphics libraries. You might also look at the memcairo driver, as this already supports both alpha values and fills, as well as unicode fonts, anti-aliasing and a bunch of other nice stuff. Of course it requires installing the Cairo library which is not always entirely straightforward depending on your OS. Could you describe a little bit more about what you want to do? It sounds like you already have some sort of language bindings for Smalltalk, but you'd like to use the graphs in some sort of GUI? On the off-chance that the Smalltalk GUI is built on GTK I would look at the extcairo driver, or if it is based on Qt then the extqt driver might be an option. -Hazen ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Start uncovering the many advantages of virtual appliances and start using them to simplify application deployment and accelerate your shift to cloud computing. http://p.sf.net/sfu/novell-sfdev2dev _______________________________________________ Plplot-devel mailing list Plplot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-devel
