I have three generic questions about PDL's interface with GD -- I am motivated by the logic that if I am confused, other n00bs will also be confused -- and an actual methodology question.
1. (Very minor point). PDL::IO::GD's author is listed as "Judd Taylor" and yet, it appears under the "Chris Marshall" namespace.. well, actually, the PDL namespace which is under Chris Marshall as the author. I guess that may be because all the PDL packages appear under http://search.cpan.org/~chm/PDL-2.4.6_001/, but I wonder if there might be some better way to "brand" them. Perhaps under the "Author" section list the actual authors' name *with* some clarifying text. 2. (Minor point). Why are PDL's interfaces with various graphics libraries under PDL::Graphics::*, but PDL's interface with GD is under PDL::IO::*. On top of that, PDL::IO::GD is actually listed under the "Documentation" sub-heading rather than under the "Modules" sub-heading. This is fairly confusion inducing. Is there a method to this madness? Shouldn't this be under the "Modules" sub-heading, and named as PDL::Graphics::GD? 3. (Major point). Right now, at least on the Mac, at least for me, PDL is severely crippled because of its (my) inability to successfully build PDL with either PGPLOT or with PLplot. However, PDL::IO::GD works very well, but is also severely crippled because of its almost non-existent documentation. Almost a third of the documentation consists of "$image->INSERT_NAME_HERE( INSERT_DOC_ARG_LIST_HERE )" which doesn't help, and also lacks a lot in terms of generating confidence in a n00b. To the extent that I have been able to figure it out, PDL and GD seem to work very well, so it would be really nice to have good docs for it. I would be happy to write up the docs *if* I can figure out myself. I have been poring through the source code, but if I really had to read the source code of libgd to understand how to use it, it would be pointless trying to use Perl. 4. Finally, my question re. using PDL::IO::GD. I have a PDL constructed out of a query from a db. It looks like so $a = [ [$var, $x, $y] [$var, $x, $y] .. ]; I want to create a lookup table based on the values of $var (a generic lookup table might not help, because the values may be very different for different vars), and generate an image coloring every $x and $y pixel in the image based on the value of $var and its corresponding color in the lut. How do I go about doing that? Many thanks in advance, -- Puneet Kishor http://www.punkish.org Carbon Model http://carbonmodel.org Charter Member, Open Source Geospatial Foundation http://www.osgeo.org Science Commons Fellow, http://sciencecommons.org/about/whoweare/kishor Nelson Institute, UW-Madison http://www.nelson.wisc.edu ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Assertions are politics; backing up assertions with evidence is science ======================================================================= _______________________________________________ Perldl mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.jach.hawaii.edu/mailman/listinfo/perldl
