Re: Porting Gnuplot to Trolltech Qt

[Ethan M. <merritt@u.washington.edu>]

On Thursday 24 January 2008 07:26, Sebi35 wrote:
> 
> I've been working a lot with Qt and I often have to use plot functions. I've
> recently discovered the power of Gnuplot and I'd like to encapsulate gnuplot
> in a Qt widget.

There was some discussion of this a long while back,
but it didn't seem to go anywhere.

  http://marc.info/?l=gnuplot-info-beta&m=109846928802054&w=2

> I have read all the docs of the gnuplot distribution, and I feel like if I
> code a "Qt" terminal, the widget will only be reachable through the gnuplot
> application. 

It is not clear exactly what you want to present to the user inside
this widget.  Are you proposing to develop a GUI that controls gnuplot?
Or are you proposing a Qt-based output widget that contains the
plots created by gnuplot?  Both?  Something else?

> Is there anyway to use Gnuplot as a library? 

No.
But IMHO this would not be a useful thing to do even if it were possible.
It is better to control the complete gnuplot app through a pipe,
possibly through multiple pipes to multiple instances of gnuplot.
The plots output from gnuplot could then be directed to any of a 
variety of output modes, including display within a panel of your
hypothetical Qt widget.  

The CVS version of gnuplot now has an example script  .../demo/gpdemos.tcl
that demonstrates doing something of this sort using Tcl/Tk widgets.
You might want to look at that to get a feel for one possible model
of control flow.



-- 
Ethan A Merritt