Re: GtkPlot vs. Guppi

[Nils Barth <nbarth@fas.harvard.edu>]

Thus spake aaronl@seul.org:
> OK, I've been in contact with the guppi people and it seems pretty cool. I'm 
> thinking of integrating my 3d plotter with guppi, making it easier to impplemrnt 
> in drgenius. I'll let you know what comes out of it.
> 
> Thanks,
> Aaron

Guppi integration would be cool!
Don't you also have some 2D graphing code, or is that basically
GtkPlot? Will there be 2D graphing?

Aaron: I've added you as the ``Dr. Genius graphing guru'' contact in
the dox if that's okay.
The current documentation re: graphing is very sketchy and will likely
remain so until graphing is implemented.

Also, a personal interest:
I'm a big fan of vector fields.
nb: a vector field on R^2 (resp., R^3)
is basically a map R^2 -> R^2 (resp. R^3 -> R^3) which is visualized
by drawing vectors at a bunch of points in R^2 to show the value of
the field/function at that point. For example, the vector field
f(x,y)=x on R^2 would look something like this:
<-- <-  <  .  >  -> -->
<-- <-  <  .  >  -> -->
<-- <-  <  .  >  -> -->
<-- <-  <  .  >  -> -->

It would be nice if Dr. Genius (guppi?) could do these, and should be
quite easy (indeed, it only took me 2-3 hours to hack something like
this in PostScript, minus arrowheads).
Beyond a basic implementation, there's lots of options to include,
such as:
* color gradients (should be easy in guppi, given the webpage)
* assorted (scaling?) arrowheads (user plugins in fact?)
* lots of scaling options
* (what to put for a 0 value at a point -- a dot perhaps?)
* animated vector fields (this would be COOL!)

If you (Aaron) or anyone is interested in this, I could give more
details. It should be an easy and very useful project.

-- 
  -nils