amr@dukee.egr.duke.edu (Anthony M. Richardson) (10/06/89)
Hi. I've just about completed a new version of the plplot software (I hope to finish off everything in a couple of weeks). The new version fixes a few minor bugs, but major improvements have been made in the Amiga window driver. Instead of a backdrop window on a custom screen, a standard window on either the workbench or a custom screen is used. The close, sizing and drag window gadgets are all supported. (When you resize a window the plot is rescaled and replotted.) Plots look really nice on an interlaced workbench. All view modes are supported on the custom screen. Other improvements include: support for multicolor plots, IFF support, preferences supported printer dumps. One other big improvement -- a driver for the PLT: device created by Jim Miller and Rich Champeaux has been added. So plotter quality output can be obtained on any preferences supported printer (I know this is hard to believe, but the PLT: output on my DeskJet actually looks better than that from the HP plotters we have here.). It also eliminates the need for a separate driver for every printer made. I hope to add support for area fills (pie and bar charts) and for Amiga fonts before I release the new version (it LOOKS easy enough to do anyway). Before I release the new version I need some help with the following: 1) Source for PD or freely redistributable file and color requesters. I expect that if I have to write these from scratch it will be quite some time before I can release the new version. Also, it would be nice to have a printer graphics requester that allows the user to set up most of the things that you normally have to go through preferences to set (aspect, threshold, dithering, page size, etc). Personally I would like to see every graphics type program have a requester like this with their own graphics dump preferences. Has anyone seen such a requester or is this a bad idea? 2) Help in Manxifying the code. I have Lattice 5.02. I would like to try to get this version to compile as released under both Manx and Lattice. I figure that anyone who successfully converted the original version to compile under Manx could at least get me started on the appropriate #ifdef's and maybe even volunteer to get the new version up and running under Manx (the same holds true for users of earlier versions of Lattice or those with 68020/30 or numeric coprocessors). I know there were some problems with trying to get the first version to compile under Manx, but no one ever told me how to fix things up. 3) I was kind of surprised that no one reported any bugs or suggested any improvements to the original version (I know it was neither bug free or perfect. Maybe no one is using the stuff?). Anyway, if you have any suggestions or bug reports now is the time to get them in. 4) If anyone has some spare time how about working with me to create a general purpose plotting program that reads data from a flat ascii file. This way Basic/Fortran programmers can also access the plplot routines for creating plots. I haven't started work on this yet and only have a few ideas. Please repond by email if you are willing to help with any of the afore mentioned items. Tony Richardson amr@dukee.egr.duke.edu