Re: xmgrace

[Andrzej Grzegorczyk <andrzej sci kun nl>]

Hello,

My comments are:
> i. is it interesting to the developers to offer easy access
> to external plotting packages?  (And if so, what is the
> right interface, given that many plotting options will need
> to be set?)

I don't say that developers should prepare special plugins and stop 
doing their job. If somebody want to prepare their own plot program 
that's no problem - they can do it. But I don't like Microsoft politics 
in Linux (if you use our program, you have to use every thing what we 
propose). As a scientist I spend a lot of time to find good tool for 
plotting. Gnuplot is very good but it is not so fast in use, xmgrace it 
much better from this point of view. Can be controlled from external 
programs and has it is the best, non commercial tools for data analysis.

> ii. would reliance on some external package, e.g. gnuplot or
> Grace, offer a quicker and more robust path to the graphics
> functionality desired for gnumeric?
>
> Speaking in complete ignorance of the underlying issues, it
> does look like a lot of great Open Source graphics code is
> not adequately exploited.

ii. Maybe not. I don't know. But prepare very good robust, fast tools 
for plotting it's can take two more years of programming. Xmgrace is 
developed already few years and every 3 month there is a new version of 
this program.  The number of functions and details is huge. Preparing of 
short plugin program which will just send data (with some data 
information like filename) to xmgrace this is a problem of 3 weeks of 
programming. (I'm trying to do it but I know only c++ and there is not a 
lot of documentation about writing gnumeric plugins in c).

Best regards
Andrzej

Alan G Isaac wrote:
> On Sun, 04 Jul 2004, Andrzej Grzegorcyzk apparently wrote:
>
> > Is it not better just to make simple plugin to
> > gnumeric which can send data xmgrace  and the rest of problem live for
> > xmgrace team.
>
>
> I am another user sympathetic to this argument, although I
> would prefer to see gnuplot used.  (A number of applications
> already use gnuplot this way successfully, because it is
> built to facilitate this.  One example: the gretl
> econometric package, which includes gnuplot.)  
>
> So the question of functionality is perhaps two-fold:
> i. is it interesting to the developers to offer easy access
> to external plotting packages?  (And if so, what is the
> right interface, given that many plotting options will need
> to be set?)

> Cheers,
> Alan Isaac
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> gnumeric-list mailing list
> gnumeric-list gnome org
> http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnumeric-list
>
> .

--


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|Andrzej Grzegorczyk                    |
|Experimentele Vaste Stof Fysica III    |
|Universiteit Nijmegen                  |
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Every hack had seven bugs;
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Symptoms, manifestations, bugs, and hacks,
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