Re: [MacPerl] Graphics generation

["Roberto Abraham at the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge"<abraham@ast.cam.ac.uk>]

On Mon, 3 Jun 1996, Paul Schinder wrote:

> Matthias Ulrich Neeracher <neeri@iis.ee.ethz.ch> wrote:
> } In message <Pine.GSO.3.93.960603164734.28390B-100000@cass26> you write:
> } > On UNIX machines I've been using something pretty wonderful called PGPerl
> } > which is a perl module that lets you call PGPlot from within Perl. This gives
> } > beautiful results, but I don't think its been ported to Macs yet.
> } 
> } Porting PGPerl might be easier than porting PGPlot, whatever that is.
> 
> Yes, but utterly useless without PGPlot.
> 
> PGPlot is a high quality graphics suite, quite popular in astronomy.
> It's designed to be used by a series of subroutine calls from a high
> level language, usually Fortran (but I believe there's also a C
> interface). I've installed it on my Unix boxen, but because I already
> know how to get done what I want to do with IDL or gnuplot, I haven't
> learned it.

Yes, I bet a high fraction of articles in every issue of most physics and
astronomy journals have figures generated by PGPlot.  It's really good for
generating publication quality graphics where you have control over all
aspects of the figure. Plus PGPlot is free (as is PGPerl).
 
<snip!>

> Porting PGPlot/PGPerl would require a compiler at the very least (and
> maybe both a Fortran and C compiler; it's been a long time since I
> installed it so I've forgotten whether gcc or f77 was doing the work.)

For most things f77 is doing the work, although there are a few device
drivers written in C in the pgplot distribution. 

Over the last couple of weeks I've learned of several Mac ports of PGPlot. 
Unfortunately most of these require a Fortran compiler, or at least a
pre-compiled library which one can call from C. I'm currently
experimenting with porting PGPlot to the Mac via F2C, so one doesn't need
a fortran compiler at any point and I can do the whole thing in
CodeWarrior. It doesn't seem like it will be a hellish task. My ambition
is use the F2C conversion of PGPlot to port the PGPerl module to MacPerl.
If anybody would like to assist with this I'd be very happy to collaborate
with others on this project: I'm afraid I'm more of a minor-league UNIX
hacker than a major-league mac hacker, so I don't know how hard a task it
is to convert a unix perl 5 module for use on a mac.
 
> If you're interested in serious graphics on a Mac, there are a lot of
> possibilities.  A colleague of mine swears by Igor Pro.  If free
> software is what you're after, Dave Schooley's gnuplot port is quite good.

I own and really adore Igor Pro - if the rest of my colleagues also had
Macs it's what I'd be using for everything, but because because most of my
projects are collaborative it's unfortunately not really feasible to use
Igor Pro in most projects I am working on.  I have used gnuplot and it
seems useful but doesn't (or at least didn't, last time I checked) have
some features (eg. support for displaying pseudo-color images and for
generating contour graphs of irregularly spaced data) that PGPlot, and
hence PGPerl, both support. PGPerl really is wonderful: once you get used
to having the data munging of Perl hooked directly to publication quality
graphics it's hard to look back. At a higher level, have you heard about
PerlDL? This is only at the early alpha stage (being developed by Karl
Glazebrook, author of PGPerl), but it's a sort of Perl data language for
doing vectorised Math a la IDL or Matlab in Perl. Sounds crazy but I've
played with a prototype version and it works (and is fast!). Once it is
more stable it would also be great to port PerlDL to MacPerl (but it uses
the PGPerl module, so I guess that is the starting point...) 

Best wishes,

Bob Abraham
Institute of Astronomy
Cambridge University