Re: mouse rotation for fltk backend

[Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso]

2010/7/19 Kai Habel <address@hidden>:
> As Ben said, matlab's default is to not react on mouse movements.

Wow, that sounds annoying. I think I remember that. The first thing I
want to do when I'm looking at a 3d plot is to look at its 3d
characteristics, and that requires rotation.

> Regarding the default behavior (panning vs. rotating) - we need a common
> setting for 2D and 3D plot here.

I don't think we do. We currently don't do this with gnuplot (or maybe
I changed that with a local setting?) and this isn't what 3d plotting
with a VTK interactor nor with Maxima does. As I remember, Maple and
Mathematica both let you immediately rotate the figure. There's no
reason why 2d and 3d plots should have an identical interface.

Is there any reason to keep Matlab compatibility here? Could someone's
Matlab code break because the 3d plotting defaults to a different
interaction?

> The weirdness you see is when the elevation crosses the +/-90degree
> level. Since matlab behaves the same, I have not investigated this further.

I think the most sane behaviour here is what a VTK terrain interactor
does. Namely, you can rotate to either z axis, but you can't rotate
further, and there's no sudden jerking around of the rotation when you
try to look at the plot from top or bottom. I'm not sure if I make
myself clear...

But I talk too much. I'll see about submitting another patch.