[Plplot-devel] PLplot on OpenGL

[Gary B. <gb...@cs...>]

PLplot is really nice! With one day of work, I've got it running with an 
OpenGL driver.  I have only tried a few of the smaller demos but 3, 8, 10, 17 
work fine.

This port is different from any of the others I have seen because the driver 
assumes that the calling program has established the OpenGL context. As many 
of you likely know, OpenGL is independent of the window system. Other 
libraries like GLUT, wxWindows, Qt, GLX, etc. provide a window system 
interface for OpenGL.

A normal driver based on OpenGL+GLUT should be possible but I'm not interested 
in that. What I want is a pure OpenGL library that I can use from inside a GUI 
to draw 2D and 3D graphs. My aim is a plotting package to use with Python 
either from the command line or as part of a GUI app. I'll do the command line 
interface using Pyro to connect to a "plot server" that manages the windows. 
I'll do the GUI with wxPython which has a wxGLCanvas that I can extend to call 
PLplot to draw graphs. Of course, the "plot server" uses the same wxPython 
class to implement its windows so the parts are nicely orthogonal.

Thanks to the great work done by the PLplot developers, I'm getting closer to 
my dream of getting off Matlab.

Now to get the Python interface working...

gb