Re: [MacPerl] PGPLOT

["Paul J. Schinder" <schinder@pobox.com>]

At 4:31 PM -0300 5/20/99, Arved Sandstrom wrote:

} I agree with Paul. I'd go so far as to say that if you're really enamoured
} of PGPLOT + Mac, that you may wish to examine running LinuxPPC or MkLinux.

Yeah, the easiest way to get it up and running on Mac hardware will be to
use one of the free BSD or Linux operating systems.  It will probably run
under OS X Server, but of course I can't be sure.  I have PGPLOT installed
everywhere I can, including under Linux on my Mac.

}
} I looked at PGPLOT in connection with PDL, and realized that I would have
} to run MacF2C and then a C compiler in order to approach the problem. I
} consider the output of machine translators to be unreadable, so I gave
} this up, anticipating potential porting which would be tough.

f2c output looks horrible, but it actually works pretty well.  My guess is
that the pieces of PGPLOT that are in C will give you the most trouble.  I
have no idea how hard it would be to write a driver for the Mac screen.
Having the ability to screen preview a plot is valuable.

}
} Other MacPerl-compatible plotting libraries? Good question.

People have already mentioned several modules that may do the job.  As far
as other freeware goes, there's gnuplot
<http://users.ece.gatech.edu/~schooley/gnuplot.html>.  90% of the plots I
make in a day will be made with Unix gnuplot.  But the beauty of PGPLOT is
that it's very easy to make publication quality plots, where you have to
struggle to get that kind of quality out of gnuplot.  gnuplot is
scriptable, I believe, so you should be able to run it from MacPerl, but
it's own lanugage is usually adequate for normal plots.

For expensive payware solutions, people at work on Macs swear by Igor Pro,
and it does produce nice plots.

}
} Arved



-----
Paul J. Schinder
schinder@pobox.com

===== Want to unsubscribe from this list?
===== Send mail with body "unsubscribe" to macperl-request@macperl.org