[Tioga-users] Tioga 3d axes, making simple things simpler, and other good ideas

[Bill Paxton]

Hello from the airport waiting area in Reykjavik!

I'm on my way back to Santa Barabara after a wonderful trip in a  
converted Russian research ship around Iceland and up to the ice pack  
near Greenland.  Here's one of the many photo's I took -- great fun!

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During the voyage I was out of email contact, so I've been catching  
up this morning.  I'm happy to see the conversations going on  
concerning Tioga.  Here are a few comments.


On May 28, 2006, at 6:48 AM, Edwin wrote:
> I've been working (slowly) on adding 3d plotting capabilities to  
> tioga.
> Till now I've jut plotted a line to represent every axis, but was
> wondering about the best way to get proper axes. As far as I can  
> tell the
> standard axis drawing routines of tioga only allow to draw them  
> horizontal
> or vertical etc. Would it be possible to have a routine that accepts a
> starting point and an ending point and draws an axis complete with
> ticks+labels etc between those?

Edwin: I believe you've quickly reached the crux of the problem with  
3D.  The issues around axes stopped me when I briefly considered  
trying to include 3D for the initial Tioga.  I can only wish you luck  
and suggest that you leave lots of lower-level hooks to let people  
craft special axis layouts for themselves.  Putting some effort into  
getting the defaults "right" is of course important, but there's no  
way to anticipate every case for every user.  BTW: yes, the axis  
routines in Tioga are horizontal and verical only for plotting.  For  
fancier stuff, you'll need to do your own, but perhaps we can find  
some useful utilities in the 2D code that might help.  For example, I  
expect that the routines for picking locations for tick marks should  
be the same.  If you haven't already done so, you should take a look  
at axes.c and see what if anything might be useful for the 3D code.


On May 30, 2006, at 12:43 PM, Edwin wrote:
> To be honest the way tioga
> works with one _big_ figuremaker class is a bit counterintuitve for my
> ruby eyes :)

The "one big class" approach is admittedly a compromise.  I'm hoping  
that Tioga will be a "gentle" introduction to the use of classes and  
methods for those who have not yet had their eyes opened to modern  
programming practices.   Believe it or not, some of my friends still  
think fortran77 and supermongo are the perfect solution for any  
programming problem!   Some of my design decisions where made to  
improve the chances of getting these poor folks to migrate to Tioga/ 
Ruby -- I'll have to ask for patience from the ruby experts for the  
counterintuitive monster class that results!



On Wed, 31 May 2006 01:50:10 +0100, Alex Gutteridge
<alexg at kuicr.kyoto-u.ac.jp> wrote:

> I'd just thought I'd mention that I've been
> thinking along the same lines. Although I really like the flexibility
> and pretty output from Tioga, there's quite a learning curve, even if
> you just want to do simple things.

On May 31, 2006, at 4:47 AM, Edwin wrote:
> Something that I've been thinking about is a simple plot method  
> that just
> plots a couple of dvectors/arrays and automatically opens the pdf  
> file.
> I've created one of those to use gnuplot before, but it would be  
> nice to
> be able to use tioga.

On May 31, 2006, at 8:50 AM, Roy Mayfield wrote:
> I asked Bill about the same thing last summer, and he gently noted  
> that
> that is really easy to do in a ruby script (simpler than his  
> examples).
> It took me awhile to get used to the make_preview_pdf() method, but I
> now agree with him and suggest that Tioga's code space be guarded for
> tough tasks (like your 3D idea, Edwin, which is really cool).

On May 31, 2006, at 9:25 AM, Edwin wrote:
> It is indeed rather simple and I agree that it should not be  
> included in
> the FigureMaker class. On the other hand it doesn't make much sense  
> for
> everyone to write this for himself. That's why it sounds like a  
> good idea
> to make a separate module that provides some simplification methods  
> around
> the tough tasks provided by FigureMaker.

Yes, yes, yes, and yes!  The focus in FigureMaker is to make the hard  
stuff possible and provide enough low-level access to build on for  
the unforeseen future.  I haven't put much effort at all into making  
simple things simple enough, and that's definitely an important  
project.  I expect that user-developers such as yourselves will be  
the source of such things.  I'll be happy to listen to suggestions  
for modifications and extensions to FigureMaker to ease your task.



On May 31, 2006, at 6:04 AM, vincent.fourmond at 9online.fr wrote:
> I also wanted to say that I've been working for a long time on a  
> fully-featured (well, fully enough !) command-line interface for Tioga

Excellent.  My little "irb" interface is just a place holder for  
those unfortunate souls who haven't yet migrated to Mac and the  
wonderful Tioga GUI I've done there!   ; - )


Cheers,
Bill