Re: Qt Wrapper for gnuplot

[Ian R. G. <ge...@kd...>]

Ethan Merritt said:
> On Wednesday 20 October 2004 05:38 pm, Ian Reinhart Geiser wrote:
>> Greetings,
>> I have been working on a KDE interface to Octave, when I found that
>> there
>> was no nice KDE wrapper around gnuplot.  So I started one.
>
> Great!
> I tried to drum up support for a Qt interface a year or so back, but no
> one
> on the development team (including me) has any experience there.
>
To be honest my wife put me up to this ;)

>> I am mostly looking for people who are interested in helping me that a=
re
>> familiar with gnuplot.  I only really know how to do pretty simple
>> things
>> with it, but I did most of the dirty work already, so anyone with mino=
r
>> C++ knowledge, and a good gnuplot background would work.
>
> I am not clear on exactly what level interface you are working on.
> Is the idea to generate plots through a Qt-based GUI, or is it to provi=
de
> a gnuplot module or driver that pipes output into a set of Qt/KDE
> widgets and windows rather than directly to X?  The latter is what I
> originally had in mind.  That way you could run gnuplot on top of Qt
> even in non-X environments.
>
The big problem I have currently is that I have a KDE application that I
want to have that will display gnuplot graphs, and manipulate them.  The
problem with the X11 interface is that it offers no ability to get the
WinID, so embedding is impossible, and there is no sane way to swallow
multiple plots.  So I dropped back and just dump to a temp png file, and
render that on the widget.

>> Currently line styles, arrows, and arrow styles are supported.  Fill i=
s
>> sort of supported, and plot for data or functions will work with most
>> simple cases.  I think the big issues that remain are the ones I am no=
t
>> aware of ;)
>
> Probably mousing feedback is the biggest issue.  Everything else is
> "more of the same" - more plot styles, more font and color control, etc=
.
> I guess there is also an obvious need to hook up a Print button that
> will trigger a replot in PostScript mode and pipe it to Kprinter.  But
> that is probaly trivial.
>
Oh yeah mouse ;)

I _think_ I can do about 99% of it in the QWidget.  I would have to
manually implement some of the nicer line following things, and selection
boxes though.  Hard, but not impossible from what I can tell.

Adding more styles and palettes are trivial.  Each object in the API
basicly has a method call QString commands() const; This method takes all
of the objects properties and outputs the gnuplot commands.  So adding ne=
w
options will be trivial.  Also for things that use the enumerated styles,
the offsets are stored in the object, so you can reference them from more
complex objects.


>> Currently there is a small dependency on KDE, but I have plans to remo=
ve
>> it, and the remainder works on Win32 or Unix.
>
> OK. Scratch Kprinter then.  But still we would want a Print button
> that generates PostScript output.  The pieces are already there inside
> gnuplot; they would just have to be hooked up to a widget.
>

Well, personally I would like the KDE API, since it makes things like
printing, copy/paste, IPC, and the general UI very trivial.  I only went
the pure Qt route, so I didn't scare off any anti-KDE folks.

If there is enough interest I can go both, but if there is more interest
for KDE, I wont complain.  KPrinter is QPrinter + Awesome config GUI.

I suppose next step is to get public CVS of this bugger up.

Cheers
    -ian reinhart geiser
--
KDE - Unix is ready for the desktop
http://www.kde.org