Chris - I've thought a bit about what you wrote about PLplot. I agree that the 'right' solution to cross-platform 2d plotting is an interface between something and OpenGL. I advocate PLplot, but could be convinced that PGPLOT is the way forward if somebody can figure out the interface and licensing (or is that just FUD?). I just figured that removing the z-axis from TriD would be a quick hack that would spur us on to finally interfacing PLplot with OpenGL. As it is, OpenGL already renders lines for us, albeit in three dimensions, so we should be able to use that rendering and force the viewing orientation to be 'straight on,' right?
The problem with PLplot at the moment is that it's build process is so clumsy. Please understand that I do not mean any disrespect to the PLplot developers: they simply cannot depend on a good shell scripting language. Cygwin? MinGW? VC++? Each of these have slightly different build processes, but batch files aren't powerful enough to detect the differences and act accordingly. The PLplot people do not release pre-compiled versions of their libraries, either, which makes sense given the large number of ways you can configure the library. The only practical approach is the one they took: to write instructions explaining how to install PLplot by hand. However, WE CAN expect Perl to be available, and we can make a number of assumptions about what we want in our builds of PLplot. Therefore, I am considering writing some sort of Alien package for PLplot. Hopefully it will be as simple as wrapping the build of PLplot in an ExtUtils::MakeMaker script (or Module::Build script, but I'd need to get a lot of help for that). A first cut would be a plain-old perl script that attempts to detect the build system and either builds the makefile or invokes the correct build commands for PLplot. Among other things, this would eliminate the need for cmake, which is even worse in my view than requiring a fortran compiler because the latter would at least be useful for other PDL modules. If I could get some sort of script that installs it on any 'reasonable machine' running Perl, we might be able to seriously consider using PLplot for cross-platform plotting. Wish me luck. I'd love to pour time into this but I'm very busy. I'm sure that describes us all. :-) David
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