Re: xmgrace



On Tue, Jul 06, 2004 at 10:20:45PM -0400, Allin Cottrell wrote:

I'll put in my twopence-worth on this.  I'm a gnumeric fan, but I have 
to agree with Andrzej's point that gnumeric's graphing capacities are 
quite primitive.  And the response, that if we just wait a little 
these capacities will be terrific, without any need for third-party 
plugins, has worn thin over the several years I've heard it made.

It's sad but true that the charting engine lost on the order of 2
years of development, probably closer to 3 trying to go through
bonobo to guppi.  It was the right choice at the time, but failed
miserably for a variety of social and technical reasons.  Believe me
when I say that writing everything from scratch was not my first
choice.  However, the price has been paid, and we've got a shiny new
engine now.  It's fairly easy to add new capabilities to bring
things up to par with other applications.
 
Alan refers to gretl's use of gnuplot.  The code that supports that is 
under the GPL, so anyone who wanted to adapt it for use with gnumeric 
would be welcome to do so.  (Gretl -- my baby -- sends data to gnuplot 
and gets it to produce a PNG file, which it then displays in a GTK 
window.)

Interesting.  I wish I had known of that before writing all of this.
It may have changed the direction, probably now, but it is possible.



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