-----Original Message----- From: boost-bounces@lists.boost.org [mailto:boost-bounces@lists.boost.org] On Behalf Of Paul A. Bristow Sent: Wednesday, July 29, 2009 10:07 PM To: boost@lists.boost.org Subject: [boost] Boost.Plot? - Scalable Vector Graphics
Jake Voytko started this library during a 2007 GSoC and I have now expanded it quite a bit, and begun to use it for my own purposes (including
plot for the Boost.Math library functions and statistical distributions).
Before I do any more work on it, I'd appreciate feedback from Boosters on how useful they think it might be, perhaps as a Boost library?
Although it still has plenty of wrinklies (the calculation of positioning of titles, legends, axes labels and ticks labels is intricate - to say the least).
And there are not-a-few nasty warts (this may be the 1st version to throw away?), so it is in no way review-ready.
But I believe it is working well enough for you to try to use it - and to give me feedback.
There are of course hundreds of programs for plotting.
What is special about *this* library is that it is in C++ and it has a Boost license.
It allows you to add just a few lines of code to the end of your C++
One Simple question. I've never used svg format before. We know it's quite easy to show an SVG file in IE or so by drag-n-drop, how can we visualize SVG file by our own, that means how to show the plots in my program not using a browser? Thanks B/Rgds Max preparing the program to
take data from any STL container (all or part) and produce a plot as a Scale Vector Graph (.svg) file. (No need to export data to a file and suck into Excel ;-) Applause!)
.svg files can be displayed by all good Internet Browsers (and even by IE8 with an Adobe add-in). They are very small but high quality, highly zip compressible, and equally suitable for printing to viewing on mobiles (only the features of Tiny SVG are used.).
It takes as little code as
svg_2d_plot my_plot; my_plot .plot(map1, "Series 1").stroke_color(blue) .plot(map2, "Series 2").stroke_color(red") .autoscale(map1); my_plot.write("./2d_simple.svg");
but you can have hours of fun trying out hundreds of options to produce some rather fancy plots.
For your amusement, attached are a few (mostly contrived) examples (with tasteless garish colors just to highlight the possible options). There are also lots and lots of other examples. (Note that the 20 plots occupy a mere 30 kb when zipped).
Unusually, there is lots (too much? - 6Mbyte hyperlinked and indexed PDF!) of documentation, produced using the C++ in QuickBook with Doxygen reference info and John Maddock's auto-indexing. But there are hundreds of options, so you will need all the help you can get from tutorials, examples and indexes.
A novel feature is the built-in handling of an 'uncertain' type (based on Evan Marshal Manning, C/C++ Users Journal, March 1996 page 29 to 38) including a double 'most likely' value, an 'uncertainty' estimate, roughly standard deviation, and an estimate of 'degrees of freedom'. This can be used to display confidence ellipses and label values "1.23 +-0.01 (21)", for example. (Of course, you can make much better confidence estimates using the Boost.Math library).
You can view and can get code from the Boost sandbox
https://svn.boost.org/svn/boost/sandbox/SOC/2007/visualization
Docs are available to build as html and pre-built as pdf (patience - 6 Mbyte!)
https://svn.boost.org/svn/boost/sandbox/SOC/2007/visualization/libs/svg_pl ot /doc/pdf/svg_plot.pdf
(or ask if you want zips instead).
Paul
PS Thanks to all those who have offered support, especially John Maddock of course. It has stress-tested the Quickbook - Doxygen indexing system ;-) I haven't managed to make the index work perfectly yet and I'm sure it can be improved.
PPS If I were doing this again, I would not use 'derived' trick to permit re-use of functions by 1D, 2D and boxplots - it causes the Intellisense of MS VisualStudio IDE 'Intelligence Circuits' to melt (and sometimes crash - workaround - delete the .ncb file) making the nice 'goto definition' feature ineffective and makes debugging difficult (as does the use of set and get functions). I suspect it makes compile times longer too. There must be a better way - suggestions welcome.
But I *would* use the chaining feature - I think it makes a very nice syntax for the user - but tell me what you think.
--- Paul A. Bristow Prizet Farmhouse Kendal, UK LA8 8AB +44 1539 561830, mobile +44 7714330204 pbristow@hetp.u-net.com