Hi all, I know the subject of contouring has come up a time or two. It has been mentioned that GIST has a good contouring algorithm. While I can't speak to the quality of a contouring algorithm at this point, I can let you know that the contour algorithm is exposed to Python in xplt. It is xplt.contour With this routine you can take a 2-D array, define a level and it will spit out points (xc,yc) which define the contour. It appears to be very fast as well. Chaco is coming along. I would like to help it grow though it is difficult to come up to speed with all the fancy threading and object class proxying that is going on. Plus, I still get occasional segfaults which I can't track the source of. One concern I have is whether or not it will ever be fast. Right now, the update that occurs when scrolling a sliding bar in the wxplot demo is annoyingly slow (long flashes everytime the sliding bar is touched). Right now, I'm comfortable with xplt and can do any number of graphs and it is very flexible and VERY FAST. Plotting is such a hang-up right now for the adoption of SciPy that I wonder if it wouldn't be wise to port xplt to Windows (I actually don't think it would take that long and I could hire a student to do over the next few months). It's not the ideal long-term solution but it would give us a known, fast plotting interface (kind of like Matlab 4.2 plotting) for simple plots and we could then continue to develop chaco as the long-term solution without losing valuable potential contributors who can't find the plotting package, or get it to work. Perhaps all of this is already available with gnuplot and we just need to do a better job of interfacing with it, but I'm not sure. Anyway, I guess I'm venting a little frustration that it is very difficult for me to get chaco working stably and well to do anything more than a few gimmick plots rather slowly, when xplt has worked reliably for me for several years and is working quite well to do all sorts of visualization, yet nobody seems to want to use it but me. I'll get back to hacking now. -teo -- Travis Oliphant Assistant Professor 459 CB Electrical and Computer Engineering Brigham Young University Provo, UT 84602 Tel: (801) 422-3108 oliphant.travis@ieee.org
Plotting is such a hang-up right now for the adoption of SciPy that I wonder if it wouldn't be wise to port xplt to Windows (I actually don't think it would take that long and I could hire a student to do over the next few months).
It's not the ideal long-term solution but it would give us a known, fast plotting interface (kind of like Matlab 4.2 plotting) for simple plots and we could then continue to develop chaco as the long-term solution without losing valuable potential contributors who can't find the plotting package, or get it to work.
Perhaps all of this is already available with gnuplot and we just need to do a better job of interfacing with it, but I'm not sure.
I've held back from even looking at xplt because I find gnuplot pretty much ok. Especially if one uses the cvs gnuplot with mouse support for zooming interactively, I actually _really_ like it. And its plotting/eps quality is very good for 2-d graphs. Gnuplot may feel old-school, but it's solid software (it's been around forever). In IPython I extended the original Gnuplot.py a fair bit, to the point where the gnuplot interface exposed by ipython is IMHO pretty usable. Generating eps output is much easier, and sipmle x-y plots can be done with much less fuss than the original Gnuplot.py demands. I did all the 2-d plots of my thesis with it last year, with very good results and no hangups. For fancy 3d work I rely on MayaVi, which gets better every day. All the code in ipython is available not just for download, but I'm willing to change the licensing (as I've said before) to anything needed for scipy's purposes. Just some thoughts. Best, f.
participants (2)
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Fernando Perez -
Travis Oliphant