Re: xmgrace

[Jody Goldberg <jody gnome org>]

On Tue, Jul 06, 2004 at 10:20:45PM -0400, Allin Cottrell wrote:
> I'll put in my twopence-worth on this.  I'm a gnumeric fan, but I have 
> to agree with Andrzej's point that gnumeric's graphing capacities are 
> quite primitive.  And the response, that if we just wait a little 
> these capacities will be terrific, without any need for third-party 
> plugins, has worn thin over the several years I've heard it made.

It's sad but true that the charting engine lost on the order of 2
years of development, probably closer to 3 trying to go through
bonobo to guppi.  It was the right choice at the time, but failed
miserably for a variety of social and technical reasons.  Believe me
when I say that writing everything from scratch was not my first
choice.  However, the price has been paid, and we've got a shiny new
engine now.  It's fairly easy to add new capabilities to bring
things up to par with other applications.
 
> Alan refers to gretl's use of gnuplot.  The code that supports that is 
> under the GPL, so anyone who wanted to adapt it for use with gnumeric 
> would be welcome to do so.  (Gretl -- my baby -- sends data to gnuplot 
> and gets it to produce a PNG file, which it then displays in a GTK 
> window.)

Interesting.  I wish I had known of that before writing all of this.
It may have changed the direction, probably now, but it is possible.