contour plots and gnuplot



On Fri, 2004-01-30 at 13:28, Jay Belanger wrote:

> Is there any interest in having gnuplot specific drawing commands?

Yes. In fact, I was going to propose that we 
	1) make gnuplot the default plotting application
	2) make it possible to send gnuplot-specfic information to
	    gnuplot
	3) ditch mgnuplot in favor of talking to gnuplot directly.

I was only going to propose 3 after demonstrating a proof-of-concept
implementation. (I currently only have a proof-of-proof-of-concept
implementation.)

My basic thesis is this: plotting with Octave is not ideal, but it is
much more useful than any plotting we have available in Maxima. The
high-level plotting commands in octave provide a wrapper for gnuplot.
The low-level commands provide a direct connection to gnuplot. I think
stealing these ideas (if not the specifics) is the simplest way for us
to improve the plotting capabilities of Maxima.

Gnuplot-specific contour plotting routines would certainly be consistent
with my ideas.

--Jim