Maybe some work to make Maxima display much better

--- U-E59264-Osman F Buyukisik <absd00t@c1186.ae.ge.com> wrote:
> 
> 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

A valid point, but are you sure it's 300MB??  My understanding was that
they recommend that RAM+SWAP be 300MB for compile - once you've got it
compiled, the binary is fairly reasonable.  If we put an rpm/deb
togeather, that should work for most people in Linux, and in windows we
can just include what we need in the install package.  I think our
current plotting is tied up with Tk somehow, and has (at least on my
machines) never felt really smooth or solid.  Also, with VTK once we
get the basics worked out it should be possible to extend the plotting
capabilities in virtually any way we want, if the examples I've see are
any indication. 

I suppose another option would be to look at IZIC, which is rather old
but has maxima bindings, which might give a head start.  It is also
relatively small, but I have no idea how portable or clean the code is.
 It hansn't been maintined since the early/mid ninties.

Maybe I'm selling our current routines short, but I can't help thinking
there's room for improvement.

CY

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