Re: Re: xmgrace

[Jody Goldberg <jody gnome org>]

On Sun, Jul 04, 2004 at 02:31:34PM +0200, Andrzej Grzegorcyzk wrote:
> > "I wouldn't call them 'bad looking' - a lot of work is being done on
> > the new graphics routines, and I'm sure the sophistication will come in
> > due time."
>
> Yes that true, gnumeric team spent a lot of time to make this graphs 
> better and better but  in the best case plots will look like excel plots 
> (that is my opinion).
Ick. that is definitely not the goal.  We need to be able to provide
plots that look like XL for compatibility, but there is nothing that
enforces that as the default or limits us to that functionality.

> Is it not better just to make simple plugin to 
> gnumeric which can send data xmgrace  and the rest of problem live for 
> xmgrace team. From user point of view I prefere to have very good plots 
> now, then just good plot in the future.
I wish that were the case.  Unfortunately the link between
spreadsheet and plotting engine has historicly been too wide to
handle nicely through a narrow connection.
    - missing values
    - implicit conversion to/from strings
    - optional XL compatibility for the plots

> Another thing is that for 
> gnumeric plots you need to implement much more options (e.g: fitting, 
> integratiing, shifting of data and so on). This is not so simple.

Thankfully the analytics are actually the easy part for Gnumeric.
We already include quick a bit of this functionality elsewhere.  The
main limitation is designing a functional UI for it.