I'm impressed that you see the importance of putting in the initial time effort to evaluate different packages for your needs. It can *really* save you a lot of grief later !
It may not be imperative that your new graphics look exactly like the old, but do you need them to be publication ready ? I agree with Lloydt that more can be done in DX than meets the eye, but some of it gets pretty messy. Do you need more than one image on a page, with exact sizing and positioning ? Do your images contain more than one element (e.g. image with colorbar) ? Since in IDL images are treated as arrays, you can manipulate them precisely as pixels on a page (such as for a GIF image). In IDL you also have "design" control within postscript of all image elements. Are colorbars an important part of your graphics ? If so, with DX you will probably end up with a big struggle on your hands. The user has little control over the labeling of the bar, which can then dramatically affect the positioning of elements. The user can tweek the colorbar somewhat after he sees that he doesn't like it, but you probably shouldn't expect a level of standardization necessary to produce consistent output products. Since OpenDX is free, why not keep it around and experiment with it for possible use when your 3-D requirements reach an appropriate level ? It really would be nice to have the capabilities of both packages available. On Mar 15, 5:38am, Johannes-Maria Kaltenbach wrote: > Subject: Re: [opendx-general] general question to OpenDX; comparison with > > Many thanks to Lloydt and Sharon Cady for their valuable information. > > > Loyd made a lot of good points, but in my opinion it all boils down to whether > > or not you need to do any 3-d or "classical" visualizations. For this, DX wins > > hands down. But for standard array imaging operations, it is sort of senseless > > to use DX. All that extra capability sort of weighs you down. In this regard, > > IDL is very simple to use. > > In the past we had very little 3-d visualizations but it will increase in > the near future; that is one reason why we want to replace our own graphics > program with one that already support these features. Another reason is the > wish of the users to "edit" the graphics output (I mean rotation of 3-d > objects, rescaling of 2d-graphics, zooming, labelling, etc.). > > > > > I'm not a computer system person, so I can't tell you much about the > > advantages/differences in that regard, but I can say that from the amount of > > traffic that goes through this news group, there are plenty of installation > > difficulties that people run into with OpenDx. > > Yes, I made this experience too (I failed to install it on our HP/Convex > (HP-UX 10.01) and HP N-Class (HP-UX 11.00) in an acceptable amount of > time; on a Linux PC (SuSE 6.3) the installation was probably not correct, > it works almost, but there are some features that don't work corretly). > > > Plus, the "Open" part of OpenDX > > is fairly new, and I get the impression that there are still a few kinks to > > work out. You might want to keep that in mind if you or your company is already > > familiar with IDL, but know nothing about DX. > > We have not yet very much experience with IDL; the colleague who has > investigated some commercial graphic systems and will do most of the > programming (adatption to our programs and emulation of our old graphics > system) has worked with IDL for 3 or 4 weeks; and there are 2 or 3 users > who have pior experience with IDL. But we know nothing about DX. > The decision was almost already made last week in favour of IDL when > I proposed to include DX in the list of alternatives. I'm generally > in favour of Open Source and I'm also impressed by the capabilities > of DX (the comapison of Lloyd war very instructive); but the colleague > who investigated IDL thinks that IDL will suffice for our needs and > I think that those who will made the final decission (next week or so) > will focus on the easier use of IDL; also the remark of Sharon > > IDL is also much more flexible with regard to hard copy output. ... > is rather important for them; I just thought I hadn't learnt enough > of DX to do the same things as my colleague with IDL; in a first step > they want to emulate our old graphic system with the new one so that > all old graphics look _exactly_ the same as they are used to see them; > a point which I personally find rather unimportant. > > > > >-- End of excerpt from Johannes-Maria Kaltenbach
