From: Roberto H. <ro...@ad...> - 2002-02-06 16:30:23
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Hello, I'd like to thank the developers of PLplot. It's been an extremely useful utility for me. All the work you guys put into it doesn't go unappreciated. I downloaded version 5.1.0 recently and I'm trying out some of its features. While doing that I came up with a couple of suggestions which I hope will help further the development of an already great utility. 1. In the source distribution, there are some documentation files that are quite outdated. For example NEWS still says PLplot is an ALPHA version. Wouldn't it be a good idea to get rid of those? Or do they contain information that is still valid and not found elsewhere? 2. I find the Tk driver to be extremely useful. In fact I used it along with Octave to build a GUI-driven time-frequency analysis application as my final project for school. One of the nicest features is being able to "embed" a plot frame in the GUI window. There were some (not many) problems during the initialization stage of the GUI when mapping the plxframe. All of them had simple enough workarounds. However, from my experience I thought it would be great if PLplot used its own namespace in Tcl. Unfortunately I didn't have enough time to learn a lot about namespaces, but enough to realize that would make things a lot cleaner (no conflicts in the global namespace or with procedure names). 3. One of the items mentioned in the "Remaining Important Bugs" section of the new version announcement has to do with the 3D shading. While searching for more information on the subject I came accross Generic Mapping Tools (http://gmt.soest.hawaii.edu/gmt.html). It's a GPL application which produces shaded plots (among other types) from data sets and outputs EPS files. The website includes some very impressive examples. Maybe the 3D shading portion of the code could be adapted to PLplot. Hope some of this is helpful, Roberto. |