Re: code reuse (was: Re: graphics issues (was: Re: ...))

[Paul Kienzle]

On Oct 1, 2006, at 11:06 AM, John W. Eaton wrote:

> Is automatic placement of tic marks along with labels really a trivial
> problem, say for 3D graphics, or when you may want to display the
> graphs at various sizes for different output devices?  I find that
> whent the font size changes, or the graph shrinks, most plotting
> packages end up doing things like smashing the labels over one
> another, which seems like a bad feature to have.  So it seems that
> this is perhaps not so easy to solve.

Avoiding label collision for 2D plots is easy if you have the
dimensions of a digit in pixels, or in the case of a vector
based output device, in points.

In 3D I suspect it would be difficult to avoid overwriting labels
with arbitrary rotation of the axes though you could mitigate the
effects by writing labels on a translucent background so that the
one on top stays readable.  OpenGL makes this pretty easy.

One problem I see with many OpenGL-based graphing packages is
that zooming or panning the plot also zooms or pans the axes,
but handling this properly is not too hard either.

- Paul