Home Original page

Scientific Plotting?

Michael Huster Use-Author-Address-Header at [127.1]
Tue Jul 20 21:02:01 EDT 1999 
I am also trying to find an adequate *object* based plotting package. I am 
writing some signal processing software and want to code plotting into the 
classes I am defining.

Some requirements:
1) Postscript output (for inclusion in high quality Word & Powerpoint 
documents) GIF, JPG, etc just do not have the resolution. They default to 72 
dpi rendering. You can overcome this on Linux using Image Magick's convert 
-dens 300. The resulting files are large.

2) Object oriented
3) Images

Our current assessment:

GIST: not enough flexibility in configuring the plots. It has the Postscript 
we need, though. We have it coded in now for some look at the data. But it 
is not the long term solution.

Plplot: uses stroke fonts, even in postscript output. We cannot get a 
uniform look with matlab produced plots. Bummer. Otherwise it looked good. I 
am afraid when blown up the fonts will look even worse. For example. To get 
a bold font you have to play with pen width and font size. Isn't 
"Helevetica-Bold" easier to specify? Also, it is at a developmental (& 
FORTRAN) deadend. No chance to change things.

Gnuplot: Runs gnuplot through a pipe. All of the data (upto many MB) also 
has to go through the pipe. Unsat. I want to plot efficiently.

plotlib: not enough high level wrappers. I do not want to have to calculate 
default axis size, where to put tick marks, etc.

Pgplot: looks like plplot.

Piddle & graphite: looks good, but not mature enough. We are keeping an eye 
on it. Probably will try it.

PyMat: I want to get away from needing Matlab licenses

I am kind of bummed. If we wrap intelligent python wrappers around 
something, we will post it.

Michael Huster
mhuster at hotmail.com


_______________________________________________________________
Get Free Email and Do More On The Web. Visit http://www.msn.com
More information about the Python-list mailing list