[Plplot-devel] FW: [Plplot-general] PLPlot and FLTK driver?

[Quezada, M. <mqu...@mi...>]

Hi Alan,

Thanks for the reply. I apologize, the QTJ in my email is a typo, it was meant to be QT followed by a smiley ---> : ) but some text renderers turn the colon-parenthesis sequence into a J for some reason. The same thing happens on my android email client...

Anyhow, I am glad you replied because I do have a decision to make regarding our application. It is currently written in fltk and I'd like to embed some plots into it. But the gui portion is not large so it is a balance between writing the fltk driver and switching our gui into qt and using that driver. I have to check with the team before I make the call. I also was wondering if the mem driver might work as an initial proof of concept for us. It seems using that driver we can obtain an image that can then be rendered by any gui toolkit that can handle displaying pictures. Is this correct? I am basing this only on browsing through the code because I could not find examples besides the one written in python.

I did look through the qt driver thinking the same thing, that this would be the template we could use to write the fltk driver. It seems the driver is just an interface that matches Plplot's api with the GUI toolkit's so that input or expose events in the gui can be sent and handled by PlPlot and then drawing events are passed to the gui along with the data in order to manipulate the image. Am I close on this?

We do have other applications already using fltk and although I am not necessarily a fan of it, I don't see us switching any time soon. So with time it might be possible for myself or my team to write a driver for it. No promises but if we do we'll let you know.

-Marco

-----Original Message-----
From: Alan W. Irwin [mailto:ir...@be...] 
Sent: Thursday, January 19, 2012 11:49 PM
To: Quezada, Marco
Cc: plp...@li...
Subject: Re: [Plplot-general] PLPlot and FLTK driver?

On 2012-01-17 22:25-0000 Quezada, Marco wrote:

> Has there been any effort to develop a driver that would integrate plplot into the fltk gui library? Just wondering if anyone has
> looked into it or if I need to plan for that or switching our gui to QT J.

Hi Marco:

Thanks for your interest in PLplot.

Could you expand on what you mean by "QT J"?  If that is QuickTime for
Java (usually referred to as QTJ), then we don't support it.

I checked back over our mailing list messages, and there were a few
mentions of fltk, but nothing serious.  Therefore, if you wanted to
develop a PLplot device driver based on fltk, I am virtually positive
you would not be duplicating anyone else's effort.

Our current interactive devices (with device driver in parentheses) are
the following:

tk        (tk)
xwin      (xwin)
wxwidgets (wxwidgets)
xcairo    (cairo)
qtwidget  (qt)

-dev tk has our most comprehensive GUI capabilities, but its big
drawback is support just for the ugly Hershey fonts.  A smaller
drawback is it uses full X capabilities (not the limited cross-platform
X) so it doesn't work on Windows.

The rest of our drivers have limited GUI capabilities, but that is
something that should be straightforward to fix if anybody was keen so
I won't mention this is the summaries for the rest of our interactive
devices.

-dev xwin just uses Hershey fonts.  It is stable and fast, but does
not work on Windows.

-dev wxwidgets works on all three OS platforms (Linux, Mac OS X,
Windows).  It does have some on-going maintenance issues although I
keep hoping those will be rectified by some interested volunteer.  It
does have access to high-quality fonts, but the plfreetype method used
is not recommended any longer since controlling the fonts used (by
mentioning the font files by name) is painful and also inflexible.  It
should be straightforward to move to a fontconfig method of
controlling the fonts, but nobody has volunteered to do this. Another
issue is the plfreetype method simple renders the text in
left-to-right fashion so use of wxwidgets with CTL (complex text
layout) languages does not work.

-dev xcairo and -dev qtwidgets are well-maintained modern interactive
device drivers for PLplot which can render CTL languages with ease in
a huge variety of fonts that are easily controlled by the user.  They
also work on all the major OS platforms (Linux, Mac OS X, and
Windows). These are the interactive GUI device drivers to use for a
prototype if you are going to develop a fltk-based device driver.

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); the Time
Ephemerides project (timeephem.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting
software package (plplot.sf.net); 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
__________________________