[Pkg-octave-devel] Plotting in octave

[Thomas Weber]

Am Freitag, den 30.06.2006, 15:04 +0200 schrieb Jan Vermeulen:
> According to what I've been reading from Debian's website, this group is 
> where all queries dealing with Octave, OctPlot and Octaviz (relating to 
> Debian, of course) comes to. Is the same true for PLPlot-Octave?

In theory: no; but Rafael (plplot's maintainer) is the Debian Developer
of us, so you are right here. octave-plplot is only one part of the
plplot package, which is probably the reason the group doesn't maintain
it.


> GNUplot is dead slow. So I began looking at OctPlot, Octaviz and PLPlot. 
> None of these packages have been implemented in Octave 2.9 yet, that's 
> the first and main problem. Is this an issue from the Debian package 
> side (i.e. it can be fixed here) or is it the developers of the packages 
> that have not yet release versions capable of running on Octave 2.9?

We just didn't try it; for Octaviz, I remember an upstream discussion,
that it needs some work for Octave 2.9. Additionally, Octaviz is
somewhat special: there was no release for > 1 year, but the forums seem
to gain some speed. Octaviz is connected to VTK, where the switch from
4.4 to 5.0 took way longer than expected.

Additionally, Octaviz is a pain to build. One hour of build time even on
fast machines.

Feel free to test compiles of these versions against Octave 2.9 and
report back. If you don't want to risk your system, you can setup a
chroot for the compiles. Please ask if you are interested, so I can give
you further advice.


> I can't get PLPlot to work in Octave 2.1. After placing 
> LOADPATH="/usr/share/plplot_octave//:" in my .octaverc, a call to plot 
> results in `Requested device xwin not available'. 

That's not how you should use this packages. Taken from 
/usr/share/doc/octave-plplot/README.Debian

"octave-plplot: Glue library with bindings for Octave 2.1.  In order
 to use this package, issue the command "use_plplot" at the Octave 2.1
 prompt."


> energy to try and find a solution to this, but initial results from 
> Google were not promising. In addition: once Octave has been run and an 
> attempt to use plplot had been made, my .octaverc file disappears and 
> every time a run Octave from then on results in the LOADPATH above being 
> executed. Rebooting my machine seemed to have cleared up the problem. 
> Saving the PLplot plot to a file (I used PostScript), showed that the 
> plot generated was turned CCW 90 degrees and the bottom part (x-axis) 
> was sliced off.

Please try again with the above command. If it still doesn't work, file
a bug; include the non-working code.


> OctPlot seems to work (and much faster the GNUplot), but I have not been 
> able to successfully draw a mesh, when executing 
> x=1:10;y=1:10;mesh(x,y), I get the following output:

I can't reproduce this behaviour. Please give the full code you hand
over to Octave (you might find Octave's 'diary' command helpful).

Do octplot's tests work?
/usr/share/doc/octplot/README.gz contains some simple commands.

> Are there any recommendations/solutions/flames from anyone? Many 
> apologies if this is considered spam to the list... Let me know where 
> issues like this should go and I will only trouble you with 
> Debian/Octave issues in future.

Eh, I consider this list to be quite friendly, so no apologies are
needed. Just a note for the future: if you file a bug, include a
complete non-working example (that is everything you type right from the
first Octave prompt). This makes it easier for both us and upstream to
reproduce your problem. 

Regards
	Thomas