On 7/31/07, Lewis Hyatt <lhyatt@princeton.edu> wrote:
Jake Voytko wrote:
All,
I have uploaded the newest version of SVG_Plot to the Boost Vault, and am looking for feedback.
Hey, I will try to look at the code when I have time, I looked at the docs though, and the output looks very nice! I spend a *lot* of time creating plots in IDL, and this looks to be quite a bit easier to use. A couple things about the docs, it wasn't clear to me what exactly I would be able to pass to the plot() function for a 2D plot. You say "any object that can return an iterator with begin() and end()", but I assume it needs to have a value type of std::pair<X,Y>, is that right? I think in the vast majority of use cases, people would just have two std::vectors and they would want to just pass them instead of having to make a zip_iterator or whatever. Is that what you meant when you said you were having problems gettind 2D plots with 1D containers? It seems like it would be easy enough to just make a zip iterator wrapper yourself to handle that, if you don't want to change the other code.
This is what I meant when I said that I was having problems. It currently accepts maps, and I didn't change the language in the documentation clear enough. My view on the 1D containers (vector, etc) is that a user will have a single container, and want to plot it in two dimensions, with the index of the data being the X coordinate, and the value stored being the Y value, and the behavior will be changed to reflect that. I will look into your suggestions and see how that affects my program. I'm a little fuzzy on C++ concepts, and I didn't see a way to say that the containers hold pair<,>s.
Also, I don't like how all the parameters start with a leading underscore. I think it always feels like you are doing something "wrong" when you use an interface starting with a _...
I agree. I generated the plot options using the macros in Boost.Parameter, which causes the underscores to appear in front of the variable names. This will be changed.
Anyway I will try out the library sometime later this week, it looks nice so far!
Also, is SVG going to be the only output format? Postscript would be a nice option.
For now, SVG is the only output format. This project is currently for Google Summer of Code, and afterwards, one of my planned tasks is to allow users to define custom image formats. Ostensibly, it's an easy task, but it becomes more and more complicated as you realize that SVG is rare in that it is a tree-based format. So, your concern will be addressed, just not in the near future.
-Lewis
Thank you for your time, Jake