[Pythonmac-SIG] What's MacPython missing?

[Marcus H. Mendenhall]

>
> From: Larry Meyn <Larry.A.Meyn at nasa.gov>
> Date: Wed Oct 15, 2003  1:19:22  PM America/Chicago
> To: Bob Ippolito <bob at redivi.com>
> Cc: pythonmac-sig at python.org
> Subject: Re: [Pythonmac-SIG] What's MacPython missing?
>
>
> SciPy and Chaco would be desireable.  I'm looking for a nice 
> cross-platform way to make plots.  Right now I'm using 
> graphite/piddle, but they no longer seem to be in active development.
>

I also used to use graphite/piddle for my graphics, but found another 
package which work very nicely: PyX.  Look on sourceforge.

PyX takes only very minor tweaking to get its setup.py to work.  An 
important point of PyX is that it uses TeX for its text rendering, and 
so produces very pretty graphs very easily.  It typically takes only 
about 1/10th the tweaking that graphite did to get beautiful output.  
However, because it uses TeX, it is a little slow, since each graph 
produced requires it to run TeX via a pipe.  Realistically, this only 
takes a few seconds typically, even on my ancient 233MHz beige G3 at 
home, so it isn't too bad.  Since I use the fink LaTeX
package, I need to do:
setenv CFLAGS -I/sw/include
setenv LDFLAGS -L/sw/lib

before running setup.py to get it to work properly, since it doesn't 
automatically look for fink packages.

You might want to try it out.

Marcus Mendenhall