Re: Plotting status in Octave

[John Swensen]

On Oct 23, 2008, at 1:14 PM, Shai Ayal wrote:

> > So, uhm... I know talk is cheap without me coding for it, but... why
> > fltk? It produces ugly widgets, while Qt produces native-looking
> > widgets. I can just imagine the Mac users complaining about plotting
> > in Octave because the widgets look ugly. :-/ Qt does have a huge set
> > of dependencies, though, plus all that weird macro hackery. Did you
> > choose fltk because it's lightweight, or because it integrates nicely
> > with OpenGL, or why?
>
> I agree fltk is a bit ugly. However, I chose it (historically in 2003
> for octplot) because it's lightweight, and I like lightweight,
> especially considering the the toolkit in this context (plotting
> window) is really unimportant and not very visible. The interesting
> stuff is happening on the canvas. It seemed to me that using some big
> toolkit like gtk/qt/wx just so that we can open a window is silly.
> Somewwhat more objective reasons for choosing fltk:
> at that time, gtk support for windows was very shody (I am not sure
> what the status is now)
> QT licensing also seemed problematic
>
> Shai

A while back Michael Goffioul had sent me his work on a GTK/OpenGL  
backend.  I agree that the OpenGL method is nice since it makes all  
the drawing stuff independent from the toolkit as long as there is a  
OpenGL canvas widget.  I intend to make this a library for use as a  
standalone backend or incorporated into OctaveDE.  You can see a quick  
little PNG of it at http://glacier.lcsr.jhu.edu/~jpswensen/gtkmmhandles.png

I finally have zooming working and am trying to figure out the right  
way of doing rotations from the GTK window.  If any of you who know  
the graphics stuff well want to expand on how the interaction between  
a backend and the whole handle tree, I would greatly appreciate it.

John Swensen