GNU plotutils, etc.

["Robert S. Maier" <rsm math arizona edu>]

Hi, Havoc, Jon and other Guppi folks.  This is to establish contact.  
As I suppose you know, I'm the primary author of the GNU plotutils package.

Glad you found the X11 scan-conversion code from plotutils useful in Guppi.
It took a _lot_ of effort to pull it out of the X11 distribution, and clean
it up.  The next plotutils release (2.3) will include a further cleaned-up
version of the code as a standalone library, called "libxmi".  It should be
much easier to drop into other source trees.  I'm going to add some
instructions for doing that.

The plotutils package, including the libplot library, will still be
batch-oriented.  But I have real hope of making libplot's X driver more
`widget-like', so that it can do its own redraws etc.  I'm starting to look
at your Guppi code (it may give me some ideas for what interactivity should
be like).

I've already improved libplot's API's to make them 100% reentrant, and I'm
thinking about adding a guile interface.  For a long time I've been
planning a higher-level library for drawing graphs, which would sit on top
of libplot.  Maybe that should be done in guile, rather than in C or C++.

Hope you like the new libxmi API; it's pretty clean.  For example, it
doesn't need a `samePixel' function any more.  The basic libxmi API is now
independent of the definition of "miPixel" (the pixel type), too.
Incidentally I really like your adding support for an alpha channel -- I'm
thinking of adding an alpha channel to libplot, at least for some output
formats.

I should be releasing plotutils-2.3 within a few weeks.

Regards,
Robert

-- 
Robert S. Maier   | Internet: rsm@math.arizona.edu
Dept. of Math.    | 
Univ. of Arizona  | FAX:   +1 520 621 8322
Tucson, AZ  85721 | Voice: +1 520 621 6892 (department)
U.S.A.            |        +1 520 621 2617 (office)

Maintainer of the GNU plotting utilities package
(see http://www.gnu.org/software/plotutils/plotutils.html ).