On Mon, 27 Nov 2006 15:55:02 -0800, David Joyner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I would like to summarize, just to see if I understand what is being > said. > > For dynamic local plotting, mayavi+vtk is suggested. > This would mean someone (presumably, William) has to do some > hard work to get this extra code to build. (The two tarballs together > is about 1M.)
vtk alone is 5MB, but I successfully built it on my laptop with little trouble yesterday. It takes a while to build, and by default the build is confusingly interactive, though I think this could be circumvented. Also MayaVI is 0.5MB. So size isn't a huge problem. Dependencies and build time are. > Alex suggests (tell me if I'm wrong) that this solution may > also apply to the static notebook graphics if one could save it to a > temporary *.png file and then display that in the notebook browser > window. Yes, and vtk does support saving to png files. > For dynamic notebook graphics, Jacl\subset Tcl/Java is suggested. > This may be years away since Java is not GPL'd yet, the various > flavors of Java may make it currently difficult to write truely > cross-platform code, etc. > First, is this summary correct? No. Java is already cross platform, and there is only one widespread java interpreter (the one from Sun). Also, I think Java will be GPL'd in a matter of months, not years. Whether or not Java is GPL'd also isn't really relevant to the problem. The main question is whether there exists today a java applet that we could use for 3d image viewing. There are such applets (e.g., Alex used one for a project he did at UCSD with Mathematica) but I don't know if there are any that we can use for SAGE. I'm not enthusiastic about the Jacl/Tcl idea. > Second, here is a crazy idea: in addition to %gap cells, %latex cells, > and so on, we have a %plot cell which accepts specially formated > input - basically you just need to input the function and other options, > but not usual SAGE plot+show commands. Hit shift-enter and the plot > appears. Also, once the plot appears, buttons/menus appear which > allows one to interactively control color, camera angle, options for > creating a gif/mpeg animation, etc. If this is possible, it seems you > can do this in javascript. It's not "live graphics" but it saves the > hassles of jacl/java and might do what a lot of people really need. > > Maybe this would provide a soln to dynamic notebook graphic problem? I don't know. -- William --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://sage.scipy.org/sage/ and http://modular.math.washington.edu/sage/ -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
