On 2009-04-26 21:43+0100 Steve Schwartz wrote: > I'm not at all complaining about your suggestion. Indeed, the reason for > my posting is because I had already thought about a do-it-ourselves > approach and therefore wondered if someone else had also either > encountered it or was more familiar with the internal plplot workings > and would have the expertise to offer a more elegant and robust > solution.
I first want to address this issue from my perspective as one user of PLPlot in a scientific research context. _From my user perspective_ the status quo is fine. Looking at example 1 the (x10#u-2#) (where "x" stands for the times symbol) is pretty ugly wherever you put it. Thus, my opinion is adding functionality to allow the user freedom to move that ugliness around may not be adding much value. Perhaps we should instead just document that scientific notation labelling as a last resort when you have badly scaled plot axes. Since I have always thought it was ugly, I avoid that scientific notation "last resort" by properly scaling my axes. What I mean by that is I use log (z) or z/10#un#d as the variable being plotted and label it as such where "n" is chosen appropriately to give a good scaling. I far prefer the log (z) idea, but when I do scale my axes by some power of 10, the programming of that is trivial so there might not be much call for a PLplot API that does that. I acknowledge my user perspective might be wrong here, but I have never had trouble generating properly scaled plots to avoid the scientific notation so I am having trouble figuring out why it might be difficult in other contexts. Putting on my PLplot developer hat now, the trick is to balance the various user perspectives and plotting needs while trying to keep our API as non-bloated as possible. (The advantage of a non-bloated plotting API is it makes PLplot easier to learn and easier to test and maintain.) On the whole, I think we are doing pretty well with this balancing act. In this case, I have some doubts as a user that the above two API possibilities would add much value, but I could be wrong because I am only one user of PLplot. 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 libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net). __________________________ Linux-powered Science __________________________ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Crystal Reports - New Free Runtime and 30 Day Trial Check out the new simplified licensign option that enables unlimited royalty-free distribution of the report engine for externally facing server and web deployment. http://p.sf.net/sfu/businessobjects _______________________________________________ Plplot-devel mailing list Plplot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-devel
