Re: Minimal requirements from a handle graphics package

[Shai Ayal]

Bill,

I think you are right in that group objects are higher-level than the
primitive objects. They aid the user in manipulating groups of related
objects. As such they might be implemented in octave itself. I'm not
sure that they can be implemented generically, but each user can
implement them easily enough for his specific plot, since all plotting
commands return the handles of the objects they create.

In any case, the reason I didn't want group objects is that, at least
for me, Implementing the primitives is hard enough, so I wanted to aim
low. However aiming high in the spec is not such a bad thing.

Shai

On 2/20/06, Bill Denney <address@hidden> wrote:
> Bill Denney wrote:
> > Shai Ayal wrote:
> >> lets go for the version w/o the "group" objects.
> > I would very much prefer to have the group objects (R14).  I
> > personally think that matlab's group objects are somewhat broken (I
> > can't assign a color to the group and have it propagate down to all
> > sub-objects for example), but I think that it is one of the best and
> > most powerful features of the new implementation.  It also allows for
> > very good things such as having a single handle for errorbar plots; in
> > R13 and before, two line handles were generated: one for the regular
> > line and one for the error bars, but in R14, there is just one handle,
> > but you can still get the granular control if you want by going to the
> > children of the error bar group.
> >
> > Groups are the most helpful aspect of the handle graphics to me, and
> > for my purposes (most of my plots get turned into svg before going to
> > eps for final printout), groups make later editing significantly
> > easier (I can group together sets of lines and then modify them
> > together in inkscape.
> Something just occurred to me:  I would guess that groups would be
> mostly manageable outside of the handle visualization.  The only place
> where I would envision a problem would be in the selection of objects in
> the visualizer (i.e. it would be logical to me that if the user selects
> an object in the visualizer the entire group associated with that object
> should be selected).  Off the top of my head other than that case,
> groups could be just made to exist within the structure of the handle.
>
> I'm sure that I'm missing something (and please explain to me what I'm
> missing), but again, I really would like groups to exist.
>
> Bill
>
>