Yet Another Plotting System for Octave

[John W. Eaton]

[Since the graphics list is mostly dead, I'm moving this discussion
to the maintainers list.  Please follow up to this sub-thread there.
Thanks.  --jwe]

On 17-Jan-2007, Alexander Barth wrote:

| I wrote some plotting routines to visualize ocean model results
| (although it can be used for other applications). I wanted to share
| it because it might be useful for others as well. I called this
| package Yapso, Yet Another Plotting System for Octave. It is
| intended to be compatible with Matlab plotting commands. Yapso is
| based on the OpenGL libraries and it uses (currently) the GLUT
| toolkit (freeglut or openglut). Yapso is loaded dynamically in
| Octave as oct-functions which allows a tight integration in Octave.

This looks good, but I'm curious to know why you chose to start from
scratch instead of working on OctPlot.

Also, it seems that the code to handle plot properties is again
tightly coupled with the code that renders the graphics.  Is that
correct?  If so, how hard would it be to separate?  I would like to
make these two parts separate so that it is easier to plug in
different plotting libraries in the future.  The plot properties
portion seems to me to just be a database problem, and it should be
possible to implement it completely apart from any graphics library.

| What I missed from existing graphics packages was offscreen
| rendering (matlab's -nodisplay option) which allows you to create
| plots from a cronjob or from a webserver cgi.

Wouldn't Octave's default gnuplot graphics do this if you set the
terminal type to something like "postscript" and the output to a
"/dev/null" before doing any plotting commands, then used print to
generate a file once you have a plot constructed?

jwe