[Kst] looking good but...

[George Staikos]

On Tuesday 02 August 2005 03:45, Cirilo Bernardo wrote:

>    KST is in the "OK" stage for most of these except the 'beautiful
> plots' criterion.  In particular, the EPS exporter merely jams a bitmap
> into an EPS file - what's the point of that?  Are there any plans to
> make the EPS exporter produce vector code?

  Not directly, but we could add "vector output" support at some point.  The 
current output support outputs images which are based on pixmaps - that is, 
they are bitmap images and not vector images.  We could add a vector output 
subsystem.  Please file a feature request at http://bugs.kde.org/ .

> Why does the color not appear in an EPS plot?

  I can't speak to the color issue, though it's most likely a KImageIO issue.

>    Another neat feature to have would be interpolating algorithms -
> cubic spline and linear would probably be the most useful. When
> interpolating the points to draw a curve, it is also nice to have the
> ability to plot markers at each point.

  You can implement much of this with a data plugin in Kst.

>    I have a tool for reading data files in "ThermoGalactic GRAMS" .spc
> format - I have no objection to contributing this code under the GPL
> although I may need to ask the GRAMS people about it first. The reason I
> was looking for another plotting program is that I truly loathe the
> GRAMS software - outside the USA I need a dongle to operate and it does
> not produce beautiful plots (I use awk+gnuplot to produce my plots).  I
> want an alternative viewer that I can install on any machine I please
> and which can produce a beatiful EPS file without the need for me to
> write a script. 

   That would be great.  You could easily write a Kst datasource plugin for 
this.

> A viewer which runs under both WinDos and Linux would 
> be preferable, but I can live with a *nix-only viewer.

   We might have a Windows compatible version in KDE 4 timeframe.

-- 
George Staikos
KDE Developer				http://www.kde.org/
Staikos Computing Services Inc.		http://www.staikos.net/