gnuplot development

On Friday, October 05, 2012 01:57:44 pm Tait wrote:
> 
> Someone just asked, "how do I map a 4th dimension to line
> color?" I was surprised to discover that the varcolor demo,
> which answers exactly this question, is nowhere to be found on
> http://gnuplot.sourceforge.net/demo_4.6/.
> 
> How does one go about updating/creating a patch for the demo pages?

If you want to contribute a new demo, go right ahead.

Or are you asking how to get an existing demo like varcolor.dem 
included in the on-line collection?  
The thing is, there's not room on one page to index
every demo in the collection.   I thought that these two already
covered the case in question

  http://gnuplot.sourceforge.net/demo_4.6/rgb_variable.html
  http://gnuplot.sourceforge.net/demo_cvs/heatmaps.html

But it is correct that one uses points and the other surfaces,
so perhaps it isn't obvious that the same commands would work
for a plot "with lines".

	Ethan

> ...
> Or are you asking how to get an existing demo like varcolor.dem
> included in the on-line collection?
> The thing is, there's not room on one page to index
> every demo in the collection...

Why not? I doubt many people run all the demos when they need help,
and some distributions don't include the demos. The demos left out of
the demos web page effectively don't exist for user help purposes.

It might be worthwhile to explore a more image-centric
layout. (http://gallery.r-enthusiasts.com/thumbs.php is disorganized,
but gives a general idea.) People often know, visually, what they want,
but not the correct names and keywords to get that result.

On Sunday, 07 October 2012, Tait wrote:
> > ...
> > Or are you asking how to get an existing demo like varcolor.dem
> > included in the on-line collection?
> > The thing is, there's not room on one page to index
> > every demo in the collection...
> 
> Why not? I doubt many people run all the demos when they need help,
> and some distributions don't include the demos. The demos left out of
> the demos web page effectively don't exist for user help purposes.
> 
> It might be worthwhile to explore a more image-centric
> layout. (http://gallery.r-enthusiasts.com/thumbs.php)

That gallery is pretty nice.
If anyone wants to put together an equivalent interface for
gnuplot demos, I'm all for it.  But I think we would have to
find a separate site to host that sort of dynamic content.
So far as I know, SourceForge only offers to host static content.
Then again, it is possible to do some pretty amazing stuff via
CSS, so maybe...

	Ethan

On Sunday, 07 October 2012, sfeam (Ethan Merritt) wrote:
> On Sunday, 07 October 2012, Tait wrote:
> > > ...
> > > Or are you asking how to get an existing demo like varcolor.dem
> > > included in the on-line collection?
> > > The thing is, there's not room on one page to index
> > > every demo in the collection...
> > 
> > Why not? I doubt many people run all the demos when they need help,
> > and some distributions don't include the demos. The demos left out of
> > the demos web page effectively don't exist for user help purposes.
> > 
> > It might be worthwhile to explore a more image-centric
> > layout. (http://gallery.r-enthusiasts.com/thumbs.php)
> 
> That gallery is pretty nice.
> If anyone wants to put together an equivalent interface for
> gnuplot demos, I'm all for it.  But I think we would have to
> find a separate site to host that sort of dynamic content.
> So far as I know, SourceForge only offers to host static content.

Hmm. I take that back.  Even though their top-level description of
project services only mentions static web content, if you drill down
to 
 https://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/sourceforge/wiki/Project%20web%20and%20developer%20web%20platform
it seems to say that PHP scripting is supported.
Not that I know anything about using PHP, but if someone wants
to tackle it, I'll help set up the necessary SourceForge access.
Any volunteers?

	Ethan

> > If anyone wants to put together an equivalent interface for
> > gnuplot demos, I'm all for it. ...


Is the HTML for the demos entirely written and updated by hand? Or do
you have some auto-generation code to create those pages? Is there a
version-controlled repository for the HTML/generator code?

On Saturday, 13 October 2012, Tait wrote:
> > > If anyone wants to put together an equivalent interface for
> > > gnuplot demos, I'm all for it. ...
> 
> 
> Is the HTML for the demos entirely written and updated by hand? Or do
> you have some auto-generation code to create those pages? Is there a
> version-controlled repository for the HTML/generator code?

The scripts to generate the demos are in directory .../demo/html

The top-level pages (index.html) on SourceForge have been manually
tweaked a bit from the auto-generated ones, but basically doing
   make
or make -f Makefile.svg
of make -f Makefile.canvas
will recreate a local copy of the on-line demos.

	Ethan