Re: xmgrace

[msevior physics unimelb edu au]

> On Tue, 2004-07-13 at 12:18, Jody Goldberg wrote:
>
> > 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.
>
>
> Seems to me that work on the scripting interface is probably the best
> route to supporting other plotting packages.
>
> With a good scripting interface creating functions to extract data and
> send it to your favourite plotting package should be fairly easy.  It
> ought to be possible using this approach to provide plugins to support
> other plot packages + if down the line a particular package proves to be
> a. stable and b. a clear winner then maybe switching to that as the
> default plotting would make sense.
>
> Last time using an external package came up I'd suggested using the
> python chaco package -- hindsight says this would have been a big
> mistake + today I'd be suggesting the python matplotlib package.
>
> This one, together with python scripting would probably work well in
> gnumeric -- as per gretl for gnuplot, matplotlib is happy to spit out
> png's that you could then attach as images on your spreadsheet.
>
> (to be fair gnuplot has been around an awful lot longer and going that
> direction would be a lot less risky than chaco/matplotlib + probably
> xmgrace).

I'll put my 2 cents in here. As a GNOME-Office developer I'm a lot more
interested in SVG images than PNG.

SVG's can be scaled and zoomed arbitarily which is what we expect modern
applications to do. The next cycle of AbiWord development will focus on
embedding. We really want embedded applications to be scalable and
zoomable. Gnumeric does this as a bonobo application. It also provides
charts in SVG format and also

We've already made significant progress embedding gtkMathView in AbiWord.
I'm now 100% confident that we can embed bonobo apps, SVG images and other
specialized applications if they're willing to work with us. As Luca has
done with GtkMathView.

In one of Jody's other roles he maintains the gnome-print package which
recently obtained the ability to print to SVG format. With this in place
and with an ability to embed SVG images and the continued excellent
progress of the inkscape SVG editor, we have to ability to get a large
range interesting integration happening.

SVG is the way to go :-)

Cheers

Martin