[SciPy-dev] xplt, drawing-time... -> (docs)

[baecker at physik.tu-dresden.de]

Hi,

the answers below concerning the xplt documentation are really
helpful - I think it would be great if the could
be put in a place where a new user could find them
(more details below)

On Thu, 13 Mar 2003, Travis E. Oliphant wrote:
[...]

> >Ok. What docs are you using for Gist? I found some stuff, but it wasn't clear to me which one is best for doing pyGist stuff.
> >
>
> There are docs from the old LLNL Release.  You could also look at Yorick
> plotting documentation because gist comes from there.  Michiel Hoon has
> some docs on his page that are an adaptation of Lawrence Livermore Docs.

I think a link to these somewhere on scipy.org would
be good (I only started to realise about xplt
after the recent thread here)

> I use xplt.ghelp('plg')  for example to bring up a pager (i.e. like more
> or less) on gist commands.

I think it would be nice to have this mentioned at
the beginning of help(xplt)!
Even better, if the corresponding documentation
was accessible via
  help(xplt.plg)
(at the moment this just produces
"Help on built-in function plg:

plg(...)"
)

> You could also do
>
> help(xplt) to get pydoc to give you a list of commands (some of these
> will be gist commands).

_some_ ! And I think that this is a crucial point here:
  a) most of the xplt commands don't have a doc string
     (couldn't one automagically convert the information
      from help(xplt.plg) etc. ?)
  b) there are just too many from Numeric - arange, reshape etc. etc.
     A newcomer will not be able to single out which command
     comes from where

     (Actually, this is a general thing which really annoys
      me -  all the symbols from the imported modules
      become visible.
      In some sense this makes surely sense, but
      is there maybe a way around this ?)

Arnd