On 2009-04-24 09:35+0200 Werner Smekal wrote: > Hi Alan, >> >> My tests indicate the normal qt devices and this important additional >> ability to access the PLPlot API from Qt applications are now in good shape >> for our early May release. However, it's a good idea to broaden the tests >> to additional platforms and configurations so I ask the developers/testers >> here to do your own thorough testing of these qt and Qt capabilities >> between >> now and the release on all accessible platforms, and, of course, report >> back >> any bugs you might find. > > Mac OS X > ======== > > * I installed the latest Qt SDK 4.5.1 and added the instructions to the wiki > (http://www.miscdebris.net/plplot_wiki/index.php?title=Qt). > * Everything compiles without troubles. > * If I run an example (qtwidget) with one plot a window pops up which remains > black. The only way to proceed is the right mouse button. Windows closes. > * If I run an example (qtwidget) with more than one plot (x08) than window > pops up which is black. Proceeding with the right mouse button shows then the > following plots correctly. Plotting speed is slow but acceptable. > * I run ctest --verbose and it passed all tests regarding the qt device. > > Windows > ======= > * Still use the "old" QT SDK 4.5.0 for MinGW only. > * Everything compiles. > * Examples run correctly, only right mouse button proceeds. But plots are > extremely slow. In example 8 one plot needs more than 4 seconds to show up > (Pentium M 1.6Ghz, 4.5 year old laptop). Wingcc needs fraction of a second. > wxWidgets less a second. > * ctest run out of disk space ;) >
Hi Werner: You know this already, but just to remind everybody else here, Trolltech just released Qt-4.5.1 (a bug fix release for Qt-4.5.0) which is downloadable from http://www.qtsoftware.com/downloads. I have repeated some of the detailed tests I did with Qt-4.5.0 for Qt-4.5.1, and there doesn't seem to be any noticeable difference. Thank you for these qt tests. However, I would suggest following up on both Mac OS X and MinGW by viewing at least some of the file results that have been generated. Of course, there are so many file results to look at so it is essential to automate the viewing process. For my testing, I do that using the bash shell for loop, e.g., for EPS in x*.epsqt; do echo $EPS; gv $EPS; done You have access to shell facilities both on Mac OS X and MinGW so automating the viewing process like this should be straightforward on both platforms. Note, there are five different software families of devices for the qt device driver. These are the raster devices (e.g., pngqt, jpgqt, etc.,), the "Adobe" devices (epsqt and pdfqt), the SVG device (svgqt), the interactive device (qtwidget), and the external device (extqt). All devices within a qt software family are treated essentially identically (except only for the specification of the format to be used). Thus, spot checks that each member of a family is viewable are worthwhile, but detailed viewing of all examples in a family can probably be confined to just one qt device per qt software family. Note that as of revision 9846, "make test_interactive" in the installed examples tree exercises qtwidget for an important subset of the examples and also runs examples/c++/qt_example (which constitutes our only test of the extqt device). So that takes care of testing for those two families. For my own detailed viewing of file results, I chose to look at all example pages for only epsqt, pngqt, and svgqt. For the platform where you are short of disk space, I suggest you exclude all devices other than the qt ones you are testing. That should save you something like 2GB of file results from ctest (or make test in the installed examples tree). One question to be answered by the suggested detailed viewing is whether the black first page problem you identified for Mac OS X shows up for all qt devices or just qtwidget. Of course, the detailed viewing also helps to find any software issues exclusive to a particular qt software family. Your comments on speed of qtwidget versus wingcc inspired me to do some speed tests comparing -dev png -dev pngqt, and -dev pngcairo results. There are some similarities between -dev wingcc and -dev png since the wingcc and gd device drivers were both written by Andrew Roach and both use the plfreetype approach to render unicode fonts. But actually these speed test stands on their own for a comparison of speeds between and old-fashioned rendering library (gd) with a number of issues, and modern rendering libraries such as libpango/libcairo and the Qt4 suite of libraries. Here are the results: softw...@raven> time ./plplot-test.sh --front-end=c --device=png Testing front-end c Output file name is ./x31c01.png real 0m36.116s user 0m25.282s sys 0m0.456s softw...@raven> time ./plplot-test.sh --front-end=c --device=pngqt Testing front-end c Output file name is ./x31c01.pngqt real 0m33.131s user 0m20.385s sys 0m0.884s softw...@raven> time ./plplot-test.sh --front-end=c --device=pngcairo Testing front-end c (process:31920): Pango-WARNING **: Error loading GPOS table 5503 (process:31964): Pango-WARNING **: Error loading GPOS table 5503 Output file name is ./x31c01.pngcairo real 0m37.643s user 0m27.042s sys 0m0.356s -dev png and -dev pngcairo are pretty similar in speed, but -dev pngqt has significantly better speed than the rest. I also tried example 8 with qtwidget versus wxwidgets (AGG) versus xwin hammering the right click (qtwidget) or return (wxwidgets and xwin) as quickly as possible to get through the test as quickly as possible. Here are the results: softw...@raven> time c/x08c -dev qtwidget real 0m5.423s user 0m3.432s sys 0m0.132s softw...@raven> time c/x08c -dev wxwidgets real 0m10.140s user 0m2.240s sys 0m0.104s softw...@raven> time c/x08c -dev xwin real 0m1.180s user 0m0.164s sys 0m0.044s The elapsed time was better for qtwidget than for wxwidgets (AGG) and always reproducible. However, xwin was much faster than either. Of course no interactive device beats xwin for speed on Linux, but you pay for it in terms of lousy text quality (only Hershey fonts available). >From these good qt speed results, I am a bit surprised you are getting such slow speed with the interactive qt device compared to other interactive devices on MinGW. Are you making a fair comparison with regard to text quality? What is the underlying Windows platform there? I wonder if Qt-4.5.0 is just not very well optimized for whatever display canvas (presumably not X) that it is using for that particular Windows platform. Alan __________________________ Alan W. Irwin Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca). Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software package (plplot.org); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net). __________________________ Linux-powered Science __________________________ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Crystal Reports - New Free Runtime and 30 Day Trial Check out the new simplified licensign option that enables unlimited royalty-free distribution of the report engine for externally facing server and web deployment. http://p.sf.net/sfu/businessobjects _______________________________________________ Plplot-devel mailing list Plplot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-devel
