On 2006-12-11 09:22-1000 Tim Jenness wrote: > > Just to clarify - it does cover most of the PLplot API and the missing items > are those that require multi-dimensional arrays.
Hi Tim: The PDL interface already has complete API coverage that is suitable for generating the complete list of all our standard examples. The only limitation of the PDL interface (that I am aware of) is that it does not allow plotting of perl results for the case when PDL is not installed. This apparently was the motivation for your pure Perl interface to PLplot, but if you wish that interface to seriously compete with the PDL interface, I think you need to supply some improvements. These are the following: * Provide the option of plotting PDL arrays. (I am glad to hear that would be straightforward.) * Provide a complete API to essentially everything mentioned in include/plplot.h. If all the API concerning multi-dimensional arrays is currently missing, that means users of your interface will be unable to do shaded surface plots (example 8), contour plots (example 9), 3D surface plots (example 11), and the two kinds of shaded plots (examples 15 and 16) that we have. Results for all these examples can be seen at (http://plplot.sourceforge.net/examples/index.html). * Provide a complete set of our standard examples. There is such a complete set for the PDL interface and presumably those would not need much modifying to work for your interface. Note both the PDL interface and those examples do not include the redundant array dimension information as part of the argument list. This is now essentially a PLplot standard for all our interfaces (other than fortran 77 and C where the array information in argument lists is obviously necessary and not redundant). The above steps are obviously a substantial amount of work, but if you decide to do that work I think your interface would compete well with the PDL interface since you would provide both the pure-perl option (for those who did not want to install PDL) and PDL option (for those who need the PDL speed in preparing their arrays to be plotted) with access to the complete PLplot API. > [...]I lost a bit of motivation when I > could not find a routine that would report bounding box coordinates of text > that had (or would be plotted) - I needed this for accurate support of the > plotting interface for AST (http://www.starlink.ac.uk/ast) that I wrote. For which device do you need a bounding box? We do calculate a good bounding box for the psttf device driver (our premier postscript device), and for the ps device driver (our legacy postscript device) as well. But I don't think we have this functionality for any other device. 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 Yorick front-end to PLplot (yplot.sf.net); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net). __________________________ Linux-powered Science __________________________ ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys - and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.php&p=sourceforge&CID=DEVDEV _______________________________________________ Plplot-devel mailing list Plplot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-devel
