Re: Plotting status in Octave

[John W. Eaton]

On 22-Oct-2008, Jonathan Stickel wrote:

| John W. Eaton wrote:
| > On 22-Oct-2008, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso wrote:
| > 
| > | VTK is nice, but it is "just" another frontend to OpenGL. MathGL right
| > | now is being maintained, it already has an Octave interface too, and
| > | it seems to already be able to do all the things that Octaviz can do.
| > | I don't know if what Shai and Michael are working does 3d graphics.
| > 
| > Yes, it does.  To start, you should build the current development
| > sources of Octave and run
| > 
| >   __init_fltk__ ();
| >   set (gcf (), "__backend__", "fltk");
| >   sombrero ();
| > 
| > Oops.  This doesn't work at all now, though it should.  So we could
| > use some help just finding out why this is broken now.  Instead of
| > taking off on yet another massive independent graphics project for
| > Octave, it would help to have some more people who are working
| > together to improve what we already have.
| > 
| 
| OK, I'd like to try this interface out.  When it is working again, can 
| someone please summarize which dependencies I need, which octavze 
| sources to use, and anything else I should know?

I checked in some changes and now the basics seem to be working
again.  So check out the main development sources from the Mercurial
archive (there are instructions near the bottom of the Octave download
page at http://www.octave.org/download.html) and give it a try.

Some things to be aware of:

  Text and image objects don't work.

  Colorbars don't work becuase they are images.

  3d plots do work.  Try "demo ribbon" for example, and maximize the
  plot window.  I think this looks really good.

Things are looking OK, but there is still a lot of work to do and
development is currently somewhat stalled because the two people who
have been doing the most work (Michael Goffioul and Shai Ayal) are
busy with other things at the moment.  So if you (i.e., anyone reading
this, not just Jonathon or Jordi) want things to improve, then I
encourage you to help out.  If you just want to wait for  someone else
to do the work, or you go off starting some other project that does
not work with what we already have, then I think you may be waiting
for a long time for the core Matlab-compatible graphics in Octave to
improve.

As for dependencies, you need OpenGL and FLTK.

jwe