Re: How does Octave shine?

[John W. Eaton]

On  1-Oct-2006, Johan Kullstam wrote:

| This is *not* true.  Octave recently got rid of the gnuplot functions
| and forced usage of the matlab graphics functions.  Also, the dot-oct
| details change too.  There used to be only two kinds of matrix,
| real and complex, now there are sparse and others.
| 
| As for the plotting functions, I understand that it is to make moving
| scripts back and forth from octave to matlab easier.

That is one reason, but to me it is not as important as the fact that
trying to embed gnuplot syntax inside Octave was a bad choice.  People
couldn't seem to understand why Octave's gnuplot support didn't handle
things like linestyles in the gplot command, or why you had to use
eval to get variables passed through the gset command.  Some of these
things could be fixed, but only by modifying Octave's parser.  Having
this tight coupling to gnuplot syntax also means that it is harder for
Octave to move to a different plotting package.

| hundreds of scripts which use the gnuplot style.  I could do a massive
| s/gplot/__gnuplot_plot/ &c.  However, I really dispise the matlab
| plotting.

Aren' these things separate issues?

|  My complaints are two - 1) I don't seem to have as much
| control over the line types and legends and such with the "plot"
| function options,

Please submit bug reports that explain the specific features that you
are missing.

| 2) I like to plot everything to a post-script file
| and view it with ghostview.
| 
| The plot to file lets me have *one* figure window with multiple
| figures in it (I can hit forward and back in gv and then select
| individual or all figures for hardcopy).  The matlab "figurea"
| approach is awful when you have 20-30 plots off one script.

Doesn't psmerge help with this problem?  Or maybe there is a way that
the plot functions could be adapted to do what you want?  With the
current system, I don't see why you can't set the terminal type, make
some plot, and then close the plot stream and still get a series of
plots in a single file.

|  I can
| also easily plot to PNG files and view them with, e.g., feh.  PNG are
| good since MS office seems to accept them readily while MS office
| postscript support is pretty lousy.

Isn't plotting to PNG still possible with Octave?

jwe