Re: Gnumeric & graphing

[Jody Goldberg <jody gnome org>]

On Mon, Mar 03, 2003 at 08:25:31PM -0500, Allin Cottrell wrote:
> Gnumeric is in most ways an excellent, even superior, alternative to
> MS Excel (and StarOffice/OpenOffice).  The one major lack, as I see
> it, is the capacity to produce graphs/charts, which is a rather
> essential aspect of a spreadsheet program from the standpoint of many
> users, but which has apparently been given short shrift in gnumeric
> development.

Let me be blunt.  Graphing has been a massive pain.  We've tried to
use existing technologies and been terribly unlucky.  Bonobo was a
resource drain that never paid off, libguppi became unmaintained,
and no code to use gtkextras ever quite materialized.  We've already
had 2 iterations of the damn framework with next to no knowledge
transfer between them.

To that end I've finally given up and started just writing
something.  Basicly a somewhat simplified guppi framework 
with the hope that I can inject pieces and lessons from guppi and
gtkextras.  Its starting to bear fruit and I hope to actually be
able to draw a graph shortly.

Folks we need more hands here.  1.1.x has long been ready to freeze
and make the jump to being the next stable release, but until graphs
come into play we're locked out.  If you have time, we have a
project.