[Visualpython-users] Re:How to print ?

[Ihor R. <ro...@tu...>]

Bruce Sherwood wrote:
>It was Dave Scherer who said this, not me.
    Oh, excuse me!

> I went and looked at Dislin, and it wasn't obvious to me how this would
> address the problem. For starters, it isn't available for the Macintosh,
> and only certain versions are freeware. Is Dislin intended to display on
> the screen or to a printer (or both)?

First of all, according to the documentation,
    " DISLIN is a  library  of routines for easy drawing of axis sys-
     tems,  curves,  legends,  bar graphs,  pie charts,   3-D colour
     plots, surfaces, contours and maps The software is available
     for several C, Fortran 77 and Fortran 90 compilers."

     DISLIN is free for all free operational systems and for all free
compilers for non-free OS. All DISLIN  extensions for Python (as well as for
Perl or Java) are free. Thus, most of DISLIN versions are freeware.
    Last year there was a long-time discussion in the NumPy mailing list
about the quality and capabilities of different plotting libraries available
for Python. The conclusion was that DISLIN is very flexible and rich library
and gives the highest quality of a hardcopy.


> I agree with the notion that Visual doesn't have to do everything, but
> being able to print (at high resolution) the graphs that are already being
> produced in VPython certainly seems a desirable feature.
     My point was to use DISLIN _instead_ of Visual to produce graphs.
Visual is the best tool to produce 3D animations, etc. In my opinion,
however, there are many other more suitable tools to produce 2D plots.
Please, do not start to reinvent a wheel !  The last C-version of DISLIN
consist of  565 functions. Are you going to make your 'plot making part' of
Visual larger and more powerfull? Perhaps, it would be better to improve
more 'native' Visual capabilities.

> Ihor, can you explain what role (if any?) Dislin could play in making it
> possible to print a  graph produced by visual.graph?
     You can use DISLIN for plotting graphs on screen as well as to save it
in several different formats (WMF, PNG, PPM, Postscript and PDF included).
On Windows you can print plots directly if your printer is HP-compatible.
    BTW, OOP addicts may use a bit outdated pxDISLIN (an object-oriented
wrapper around the DISLIN) available at
http://pantheon.yale.edu/~pmm34/pxdislin.html

With best wishes,
Ihor Rokach