On Sun, 2004-02-01 at 04:12, Alberto Gonz=?iso-8859-1?Q?=E1lez?= Palomo
wrote:
> On Fri, 30 Jan 2004 15:22:59 -0600
> James Amundson <amundson@users.sourceforge.net> wrote:
>
> > 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'd like to request that those changes are done taking into account
> the possibility of using some other plotters. I'm working on my own one
> ("there are others like it, but this one is mine"), which currently reads
> the maxout.gnuplot files and plots them.
I'm afraid your request is well outside the scope of my plan. I would
summarize what I plan to do as follows: Produce a workable plotting
solution for Maxima right now. There current default solution (openmath)
has many problems, including some serious bugs. Given equal amounts of
work, I think I can get more functionality out of a gnuplot interface
than I can out of openmath.
I am not interested in creating a more generalized interface to plotting
programs at the present time. If someone else is interested in doing
such a thing, I will not try to stop him/her. I would like to see better
plotting in the future, but I would first have to see a plotting package
that compelled me to switch from gnuplot. I actually hate gnuplot, I
just hate it less than everything else. I am eagerly awaiting a superior
replacement.
> I could make a gnuplot emulator wrapper, but I'd like to be able
> to use it directly. So things like allowing gnuplot-specific parameters
> in the invokation of Maxima's plot functions would be an inconvenient for
> me.
I would consider writing code to emulate gnuplot's interface a complete
waste of time. Gnuplot's interface is terrible. Awful. Disgusting. You
would be better off writing a little lisp code to get maxima to talk to
your interface.
--Jim