On 12 March 2013 22:46, Tim Docker
On 12/03/13 05:26, Jason Dagit wrote:
Myself and several of my friends would find it useful to have a plotting library that we can use from ghci to quickly/easily visualize data. Especially if that data is part of a simulation we are toying with. Therefore, this proposal is for: A gnuplot-, matlab- or plotinum-like plotting API (that uses diagrams as the backend?). The things to emphasize: * Easy to install: No gtk2hs requirement. Preferably just pure haskell code and similar for any dependencies. Must be cross platform. * Frontend: graphs should be easy to construct; customizability is not as important * Backend: options for generating static images are nice, but for the use case we have in mind also being able to render in a window from ghci is very valuable. (this could imply something as purely rendering to JuicyPixels and I could write the rendering code)
I maintain the Chart library:
http://hackage.haskell.org/package/Chart
I'd like to see it used more widely, but gtk/cairo seems to be a problem for many people.
Is the cairo dependency the reason you are suggesting that an alternative plotting library be built? Is your problem with cairo the difficulty in setting it up on ms windows/osx? What graphics API would you suggest using to "render in a window from ghci"?
If there were a good cross platform alternative to cairo, I'd happily target this additional 2D drawing API. However, I don't think there currently is one. Neither gloss nor the diagrams library currently have adequate text support.
This is probably a completely stupid and bonkers idea... but I wonder whether using Inkscape's ability to be able to export PDF or PS files that can be imported into LaTeX and let LaTeX deal with the text placement/rendering would work... Rather fiddly for just a "give me an image" library though :)
Tim
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