Repost: Re: Scientific Plotting?

[mhuster at hotmail.com]

Repost:
My apologies for mangling my return address on the post. I wanted to
avoid more spam by the mangling. My e-mail address was included at the
bottom. Hmmm. If only I could count the number of spam e-mails I will
get from this repost,...

Original reply:

I am also trying to find an adequate *object* based plotting package. I
am writing some signal processing software and want to code plotting
into the classes I am defining.

Some requirements:
1) Postscript output (for inclusion in high quality Word & Powerpoint
documents) GIF, JPG, etc just do not have the resolution. They default
to 72 dpi rendering. You can overcome this on Linux using Image Magick's
convert -dens 300. The resulting files are large.

2) Object oriented
3) Images

Our current assessment:

GIST: not enough flexibility in configuring the plots. It has the
Postscript we need, though. We have it coded in now for some look at the
data. But it is not the long term solution.

Plplot: uses stroke fonts, even in postscript output. We cannot get a
uniform look with matlab produced plots. Bummer. Otherwise it looked
good. I am afraid when blown up the fonts will look even worse. For
example. To get a bold font you have to play with pen width and font
size. Isn't "Helevetica-Bold" easier to specify? Also, it is at a
developmental (& FORTRAN) deadend. No chance to change things.

Gnuplot: Runs gnuplot through a pipe. All of the data (upto many MB)
also has to go through the pipe. Unsat. I want to plot efficiently.

plotlib: not enough high level wrappers. I do not want to have to
calculate default axis size, where to put tick marks, etc.

Pgplot: looks like plplot.

Piddle & graphite: looks good, but not mature enough. We are keeping an
eye on it. Probably will try it.

PyMat: I want to get away from needing Matlab licenses

I am kind of bummed. If we wrap intelligent python wrappers around
something, we will post it.

Michael Huster
mhuster at hotmail.com



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