Re: No subject given

[Robert S. Maier]

>     On the octave-maintainers mailing we were wondering how hard an 
>     eventual port of plotutils to gnu-win32 would be. Have you any idea 
>     about?

Hi Peter and all, this is to let you know that the plotutils (in particular
the libplot graphics library and the programs [graph, plot, tek2plot] based
on it) have been reported to work on the cygwin32 system.  At least,
plotutils-1.3 was reported to work.

The fellow who got plotutils-1.3 to work [several months ago] is Bill Mullins
<address@hidden>.  He worked around some bugs, which were
minor.  He says that on the cygwin32 system, he needed to change the order
in which the linking of X libraries takes place.  But that sounds like a
cygwin32 problem, not a plotutils problem.  The other bugs he reported,
I have fixed in the just-released version 2.0.

I do not have any reports yet on plotutils-2.0 and gnu-win32.  Beginning
with plotutils-2.0, libplot is installed as a DLL (the installation process
now uses GNU automake and libtool to do the installation).  It would be
good to try out the installation process and verify that libtool works as
it should.  Bill Mullins reported that he was able to install and use
plotutils-1.3 on both Windows NT and Windows 95 systems.

Here are my future plans for libplot: I want to break the plotting function
of the `graph' executable into a plotting layer, which will sit on top of
libplot.  I'd like to add support for additional types of 2-D plot, and
even 3-D plot.  I'd also like to make `graph' a more configurable program
(perhaps there should be more directives allowed in its input files, or
even a formal scripting language should be supported).

I also intend to release a C++ binding for libplot, with the basic vector
graphics abstraction (a `Plotter') implemented as a C++ class.  Almost all
the work for this has already been done.  (A `Plotter' is already a
structure which includes both data and methods.  Also, you can already use
g++ instead of gcc as your compiler, when compiling and installing the
package).

If anyone has any comments on these plans, or suggestions, by all means let
me know.  I'd very much like libplot and graph to be useful to the octave
community.  (My goal is for libplot to become a sort of universal graphics
layer, for vector [non-bitmap] graphics, at least.)

--Robert