Hi!

Thanks for both you answers mr. Smekal and mr. Ross!

On 16. May, 2009, at 1:28 PM, Werner Smekal wrote:

> src directory, include directory, csa and nn lib, wxWidgets driver  
> code and qhull (external) library. Maybe more. But as Andrew said I  
> wouldn't do that. It's better to write a script, which downloads  
> plplot and qhull, installs it in a local directory and wxMaxima  
> uses that library. I use that in my programs as well and that is  
> minimum effort for the user.

That would in effect mean, I could compile a plplot.dll and package  
it with wxMaxima.exe, similarly plplot.dylib in wxMaxima.app on Mac  
and it would work without hassle for the end user, right?
wxMaxima needs to stay a 'download-and-run' application, at least for  
Windows and Mac users, who might not know how to compile and install  
a library.

> You don't need qt, only for the qt drivers. Antialiased drawing is  
> possible with the wxGraphicsContext backend available for wxWidgets  
> 2.8.x. I plan to add support saving to png files using wxWidgets  
> directly. In fact it's already in the code, but not really enabled,  
> since I'm still thinking of providing a wxpng, wxtiff, etc. devices  
> explicitely. This is work in progress and finished soon. the svg  
> driver doesn't need a library and the pdf driver depends on the  
> haru library. While the png output would be exactly the same as  
> what you see with the wxWidgets driver, the pdf output might be a  
> little bit different.

Great, I thought so! I like the fact that wxGC takes care of cross  
platform drawing (GDI+, CoreGraphics, cairo) and at least to some  
degree delivers the same result on all three praltforms.

About PDF files - using libharu would of course mean that the output  
would be different than the plot looks in the wxWidgets application.  
Do you think, using something like
http://wxcode.sourceforge.net/components/wxpdfdoc/
would produce the same result as viewed from the application? Is it  
featurefull enough even for plplot drawings?

> wxWidgets is slower, but not extremely slower. AFAIR from my tests,  
> about 3 times slower, but this also includes the start of the  
> application which should not be added to the plotting time. Anyway,  
> I use plplot in my application and resize is very fast if it's a  
> line plot. A 3d-surface plot with many points will not behave like  
> that very likely - so it depends on the plot. Cairo, QT will not be  
> faster. In fact wxWidgets on Linux uses cairo for the  
> wxGraphicsbackend, while wxWidgets on Mac uses carbon or the newer  
> Graphics API directly, so it should be as close to the speed you  
> would get with a native Mac driver.

I had an idea, that while rotating or resizing, I would draw only the  
axes (box) of the graph, not the surface/lines - to make resizing/ 
rotating smooth while perserving some visal guidance, how the plot  
will look like. With your experience with plplot - would that work?

> Still the wxWidgets driver can be optimized for speed, but this was  
> not my main task in the past, since it was fast enough for me.
>
> Regards,
> Werner


It's very nice to find such a complete open source plotting library  
AND it's being still actively developed. Most plotting libraries are  
kind of half done and abandoned, so I'm grateful for all the effort  
of plplot developers to countine developing/improving it.

Regards,
Ziga


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