[Pythonmac-SIG] Plotting Packages (What's MacPython missing?)

[Larry Meyn]

On Wednesday, October 15, 2003, at 01:17 PM, Bob Ippolito wrote:

> On Wednesday, Oct 15, 2003, at 16:11 America/New_York, Louis M. Pecora 
> wrote:
>
>>> I also used to use graphite/piddle for my graphics, but found 
>>> another package which work very nicely: PyX.  Look on sourceforge.
>>>
>>> PyX takes only very minor tweaking to get its setup.py to work.  An 
>>> important point of PyX is that it uses TeX for its text rendering, 
>>> and so produces very pretty graphs very easily.  It typically takes 
>>> only about 1/10th the tweaking that graphite did to get beautiful 
>>> output.  However, because it uses TeX, it is a little slow, since 
>>> each graph produced requires it to run TeX via a pipe.  
>>> Realistically, this only takes a few seconds typically, even on my 
>>> ancient 233MHz beige G3 at home, so it isn't too bad.  Since I use 
>>> the fink LaTeX
>>> package, I need to do:
>>> setenv CFLAGS -I/sw/include
>>> setenv LDFLAGS -L/sw/lib
>>>
>>> before running setup.py to get it to work properly, since it doesn't 
>>> automatically look for fink packages.
>>>
>>> You might want to try it out.
>>>
>>> Marcus Mendenhall
>>
>> Thanks, Marcus.  This is good news.  I still use Piddle, but in the 
>> system 9 'subspace' while running OS X.  I'd like to move Python into 
>> the OS X world, but haven't found a replacement for Piddle (nice 
>> package, really, but neglected, it seems).
>
> I did kinda port Piddle to OS X.. it's in my PackMan repository ( 
> http://undefined.org/python/pimp/ ) or 
> http://undefined.org/python/piddle-1.0.15-osx.tgz for source.  It's 
> not a port I'd swear by, but it should do just about everything the OS 
> 9 one did.
>
My thanks to Bob (and possibly others) for getting Piddle and graphite 
working on OS X.  They both seem to have new setup.py files that work 
and the QuickDraw output has been resurrected.  One thing I always 
liked about Piddle was the multiple choices for graphics output (PDF, 
QuickDraw, tk, etc.).

Marcus, thanks for the info on PyX.

--Larry