Larry Price wrote: > > On 5 Jun 2002, Ben Barrett wrote: > > > Matt used TeX to create the PDF's we would've seen if the projector had > > been liked by his iBook... like he said, he's been happily using that > > instead of creating PowerPoint presentations for the various talks he > > travels for. I guess it depends on what end result you're attached to > > or hoping for. Is it the "look" that just doesn't do it for you, or the > > process? > > > > benb > I do have unrealistically high expectations for my own output, > obviously any charts and graphs i produce will be able to serve unedited > as examples for the next edition of "Visual Display Of Quantitative > Information". ;-) > > in reality I'm interested in finding a fairly rapid response toolkit that > I can use interactively to asymptotically approach "that which is not > chartjunk" and the pipeline starts getting longer when you throw in things > like LateX2pdf Did you attend one of Tufte's seminars up in Portland? I went a couple years ago and it was interesting enough but I never could get anyone at work to listen to the ideas he had, except of course for the GIS person who liked the idea that we should listen to GIS people because they've been making charts for a long time. ;-) > > PS - some data formats are a problem, but have you looked at scilab? > > or octave? both are quite powerful. > > octave at least has been on my agenda for a while as something to explore, > but right at the moment I'm more focused on things like DEM and other gis > data. > > GRASS gis is something I'm probably going to rebuild my home workstation > around in another week or so. > http://grass.ibiblio.org/gdp/index.html > You've looked at opensourcegis.org ? They seem to have a few DEM reading packages. Also, I've never had a need to use it but xlispstat seems interesting for doing statistical analyses. Octave is good, I used it to do some data munging of my dissertation and found simple enough but not so overly simplistic that you couldn't get work done. J. Toman
