[Kst] Re: On k/qmatplot, kst, LabPlot and xmgrace...

[Stefan Gerlach]

Hi,

I'm the maintainer (and main developer) of LabPlot. I started this project 3 
years ago to develop an application which is comparable to Microcal Origin or 
SPSS Sigmaplot on Windows but runs on Unix platforms. Please have a look at 
http://staff.mbi-berlin.de/gerlach/Linux/LabPlot/.

Grace has some nice features like scripting and data transformation but has 
also some hard limitations (no 3d plots, Motif GUI -> no KDE integration).
kmatplot/qmatplot was a nice project but unfortunatly stopped 2 years ago. 
kmatplot makes some real nice 3d plots.
From kst i just heard a month ago. Its mainly for big and online data 
analysis, if i understood right. Does it support 3d or surface plots? I had 
no time to have a closer look at this program.
There is another project called kpl 
(http://frsl06.physik.uni-freiburg.de/privat/stille/kpl/) which also uses 
KDE. I found it to be complicated and somehow limited at the moment.

So there are only 3 "good" plotting programs out on Linux/Unix (Grace, kst and 
LabPlot) compared to how many plottings applications are out for Windows 
platforms. I thing it's good to have different applications for similar 
problems (like KDE vs. GNOME), so one can share ideas and test different 
things. Because it's all free software, we all can learn from each other  
without any commercial interests.

I also like to hear from the other developers.

Regards,
Stefan

On Wednesday 10 March 2004 15:35, you wrote:
> Hi everybody,
>
> I developed a Qt-based frontend to xmgrace (http://gaiw.sf.net, site not up
> to date but if you're interested I can send you the latest
> information/sources) some time ago as Grace was the only mature plotting
> program I had found back then.
> Now, from what I see there is a number of interesting plotting programs out
> there, from qwt for low-level widgets to kmatplot/qmatplot and kst or
> LabPlot, and I hope to see something really good emerge ouf of all this. I
> just have the feeling that resources are being wasted by developing many
> different programs with similar goals. I'd be curious to hear your opinion
> about this ?
>
> Regards,
>
> Nicolas