[MATRIX-SIG] [long] A NO-Proposal for a plot-package

[Aaron Watters]

>This having been said, I use unix and xmgr is designed for X. I can't
>say if/how it could be made more universal in a way which would suit the
>entire Python community. Have others already written off xmgr because of
>this?

For the purposes of business software, I think that might be a pretty
good reason to write it off, unless there is some more general portability
available which doesn't present itself from the url ref.

Rob Hooft writes:
>One thing I learned: do not write your own output. I can do a lot of
>things with my plotting package because the output is generated in
>Xfig code, 

>From another perspective you could say "have clear OO interfaces
to an abstract back end" much like the SGML parser in the standard
libs interfaces to an abstract formatter which can be plug replaced
with something that talks tk, flat text, wpy, whatever...  The down side
is that a lot of hard thinking should be done up front to keep the
interface clean (if it's not done it'll get hacked up and horrible, I promise).

A couple notes on this thread: 2 back ends come to mind strongly
 1) opengl
 2) awt/jpi as outlined in http://www.ndim.edrc.cmu.edu/dougc/jpi/Home.html
Of course, when Jim's pyjava gets working that too.
   -- Aaron Watters

ps: Is there a standard book on the topic of plotting?  It might provide
  a framework for discussion.



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