--- Raymond Toy <toy@rtp.ericsson.se> wrote:
> For plot2d_ps, the
> axes are unlabeled. The bounding box is the whole page, the tick
> marks are way too small, etc. For plot3d, the xyz axis is always the
> same size, there are no tick marks, no bounding box, etc.
Yes, I'd wondered about that too. It did seem quite useless without
more options available.
> Openmath isn't bad, but it lacks a lot of stuff too. My personal
> favorite is gnuplot, which at least has axis labels and tick marks.
> You can save the output for later too. And gnuplot produces pretty
> good PS and EPS output for use in other documents.
gnuplot is the best option currently, but really needs some overhall as
far as the interface is concerned. If one is using a newer gnuplot you
can rotate a 3d plot without replotting each time, which is MUCH
faster. Plus, none of the more convenient gnuplot settings are
available (pm3d, axis labels, etc) from the gui IIRC. And one can't
save the configuration options used by maxima to reproduce a particular
plot. It could really be made much more convenient.
> I have not tried geomview or zic in ages. Zic used to make very nice
> 3D shaded plots but was confused when you had 8-bit and 24-bit
> X visuals. I don't even know if they work anymore.
geomview has some SERIOUS issues with more modern systems - I can't
compile it anymore and a report on the Debian list from a developer
indicates the problem is very nasty. Zic still has the issues with
8-bit vs. 24-bit, and would require some significant rewriting to fix.
Ziclib itself still compiles with just a few minimal fixes, but the
interface stuff is based on tcl/tk 3.something and assumes 8 bit in
lots of places in the code. Ziclib is probably worth the trouble of
modernizing at some point - it's output is very nice and it doesn't
suffer from gnuplot's bizarre license restrictions, so we can do what
we want :-). I created a self contained linux binary of zic that
hopefully will do the non-color plotting just fine, and I think will do
color if you put X into 8 bit mode (ugh). Don't know if it can still
interface with Maxima, I never got that far. I can't run it on my
gentoo system anymore, but it did work OK on an older Redhat machine
when I built it. The binary is here for the brave:
http://maxima.sourceforge.net/misc/izic-linux.tar.gz
CY
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