From octave-graphics-request at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu  Thu Feb 24 08:51:14 2000
Subject: Re: New on the list : new plotting tool
From: Teemu Ikonen <tpikonen at pcu dot helsinki dot fi>
To: "John W. Eaton" <jwe at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu>
cc: Tim Piessens <Tim dot Piessens at esat dot kuleuven dot ac dot be>,         Discussion list octave-graphics <octave-graphics@bevo.che.wisc.edu>
Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 16:51:10 +0200 (EET)

On Thu, 24 Feb 2000, John W. Eaton wrote:

> Does Guppi require gnome to work?  If so, it can't be the default
> plotting package for use with Octave, since not all Octave users are
> going to be using the gnome desktop.  Even if Guppi doesn't require
> gnome, but only runs under X (or some other GUI), then it is not
> likely that it could be adopted as the default plotting package, since
> not everyone who uses Octave is using a GUI.

Guppi does use Gnome libraries, and of course it should not be the only
option for plotting. However, I think that a reasonably large percentage
of Octave users do their work on a computer which is capable of running
Gnome (ie. a modern unix on reasonably modern hardware). Of course this is
not always the case and the plotting API or a subset of it should be
implemented by using - for example - gnuplot.

Now I haven't looked at the Octave source code for plotting, but everytime
I tried to use Octave for any nontrivial plotting I ended up using obscure
gplot commands and eventually starting matlab to get some work done. As
I'm somewhat of a free software fan, I'd like to use Octave for my
data-analysis and I hope someone has the time to design a decent set of
plotting commands (or clone them from matlab, although matlabs commands
suck too) which could be used to run a user-friendly plotting
program.

t.