Re: graphics crossroads

[Søren Hauberg]

John W. Eaton skrev:
[snip]
> This (sort of) works, but to be fully functional, we have to save
> *everything* about the plot, because anything that happens before the
> "set multiplot" will not work properly.
To me it makes perfect sense to save *everything* -- I'm actually 
surprised that it's not the case in the current implementation.

> I can keep moving down the current path of moving more things to the
> global data structures that are in place now, but since it all seems
> like a bad kluge, I think this path is a dead end.  So do we want
> Octave 3.0 to still have the bugs with printing, a kluge for legend, no
> ability to plot on top of images, temporary data files for plot data,
> etc.?  If not, then I think now is the time to switch to the object
> graphics implementation.
One possibility would be to remove plotting support from octave. Then 
have a package containing the current plotting functions, and another 
package containing the development graphics object based system. That 
way it would be easier to release 3.0 if the objects based system takes 
time to develop.
(I'm not sure if this is a good idea, but I thought I'd mention it...)

> It is also OK with me if arbitrarily mixing calls to __gnuplot_raw__
> and the higher level plotting commands fails, because we've been slowly
> moving in that direction anyway with the renaming of the gnuplot-style
> commands to be underscored internal commands names.  Until we have a
> fairly complete set of object graphics properties available, we will
> just have to tell people that if they want full control over graphics,
> they will need to write their data to a file and use their favorite
> plotting package to generate the plots.  This has really always been
> the case.  It's unfortunate that Octave ever had the gplot and gset
> commands that made it appear that complete control over gnuplot was
> possible (it never was).
It's fine with me if the __gnuplot_raw__ calls fails. But if we really 
want people to stop using these commands it might be helpful to provide 
some functions to write your data to a file that gnuplot can read.

> Comments?
Now that it's possible to plot on top of images, the plotting system 
does all I need. More control over things like line thickness etc, would 
be nice, but not something that's important to me.
So I think the move to an object based should be done because it would 
the code more maintainable.

Søren