Gnuplot

[Daniel J Sebald]

Dear Octave graphics developers and maintainers,

There has been some discussion on the Gnuplot developer list
about  image support and binary data input.  We are curious if
Octave developers have interest in the discussion and/or in
giving feedback on Gnuplot/Matlab interaction.  (I seem to
recall binary data being on your wish list.)

I'll briefly explain how this has come about and which Octave
mailing list I should direct any further comments to.

I briefly looked through the graphics mailing list and see that
Eric Chassande-Mottin contributed a script which uses
Gnuplot's pm3d features to plot images with the common
annotation for axes, etc.  This is essentially the motivation for
incorporating an image routine into Gnuplot.  (The main
difference between pm3d and the image routine is that pm3d
plots in rectangles while the image routine attempts to use the
underlying driver imaging functions.)  The  image routine is
currently a patch but is robust and works nicely with Octave's
image scripts. There is still some syntax to be decided on.

The issue is that images have a lot of data and to make viewing
them reasonably fast requires a binary data mode, as opposed
to saving images in ASCII format in a file.  This was done in
a hack fashion in Gnuplot just as a "proof of concept".  An
image from Octave is written in binary format to a file via the
fwrite() command, then Gnuplot can read the binary data file.

So, the discussion on the Gnuplot list right now is about how best
to implement binary data in terms of syntax, etc. anticipating
how various applications might use the feature.

I have a string of emails on the discussion if someone is interested
and I welcome anyone to join the Gnuplot discussion list for
a while:  http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/gnuplot-beta

Regards,

Dan Sebald