Nicolas,
> As with gnuplot 4 it is for example possible to select with the mouse
> and do some zoom, this is very promising.
>
> I think that the hability to do some interactions with the mouse
> (zoom, slide, rotation ... ) will be very appreciated by the users.
You can rotate 3d scenes in windows + Maxima 5.11.
In Linux, you need current cvs Maxima to rotate the objects.
> Just 2 ideas (unfortunately, I do not have the expertise to do the
> actual developpement myself)
>
> 1/ plplot allows to do much scientific plotting and can already today
> by linked to many programming languages as shown in
> http://plplot.sourceforge.net/examples/index.html
> Maybe maxima could be in the list without too much efforts.
>
I'm not familiar with plplot, but someone made some suggestions about
plplot in this mailing list. Well, I concentrate my efforts in gnuplot,
and I think Jaime is working in something similar on openmath. The door
is open to new projects, of course.
> 3/ for 3D, the hability to rotate online the model would be very very
> welcome.
As said before, this is not a problem any more. I could copy the
necessary lines of code in src/plot.lisp to gpdraw.lisp for those users
who run Maxima 5.11 in Linux. I think it should work.
> I don't know how good gnuplot can be at this but I think the
> VTK (http://public.kitware.com/VTK/index.php) toolkit could be useful.
>
Gnuplot is not very good for 3d modeling, I'm affraid. For example, I'd
like to plot polyhedra; I know how to plot the edges (with gpdraw's
'point' object and property 'points_joined' set to 'true' this is very
easy once you know the coordinates of the vertices), but I don't know
how to plot the faces (does anybody know?), so that you only see those
which are closer to the view point.
On the other hand, I have tried to incorporate colors to surfaces
(setting pm3d), but found some problems in rendering multiple objects; I
have to investigate if it was my fault, or gnuplot's.
> THanks again,
Thanks for your comments.
Mario
--
Mario Rodriguez Riotorto
www.biomates.net