Maybe some work to make Maxima display much better

The only problem I have with VTK is that it is HUGE! It seems crazy to 
add that much bulk to maxima. Also, it is not that trivial to compile
on different platforms. Current plotting (I think zplot for 3d) seems
ok to me. 
I use VTK for other visualization tasks. Very nice, but
not easy to install. Current maxima takes about 33MB with three
different lisp fasls and  dump files. VTK at least 300 MBs.
Too many dependencies will make maxima less attractive to install/use.

Osman

C Y writes:
 > My prefered general solution would involve two other major pieces -
 > wxWindows replacing Tcl/Tk, and a new plotting solution (particularly
 > 3D) based on the Visualization Toolkit.  Both of these libraries are
 > robust and powerful, and there has already been a little work done on
 > getting these libraries to communicate.  The problems, however, are
 > nontrivial.  The plotting logic in maxima would need to be adapted to
 > VTK, and new VTK routines would have to be defined for plotting. 
 > GtkMathView would have to be adapted to work with wxWindows, to handle
 > maxima syntax, and hopefully ultimately to support formatted input as
 > well as handling the output.  The internal structure of maxima would
 > have to be restructured, with an eye towards communicating with
 > external interfaces.  (The last probably will have to be done anyway,
 > no matter what solution we decide on.)  Foreign function interfaces
 > would most likely have to be developed, although it is my hope that the
 > need for them could be kept to a minimum.  Once all this was
 > accomplished, however, we would have a general and extremely powerful
 > solution, with many of the major libraries being independantly
 > maintained.