On Mon, Aug 30, 2004 at 03:59:54PM -0400, Delirium wrote:
Edward Peschko wrote:
- ability to upload a gnuplot data file, and have it turn into an
associated PNG graph inside mediawiki.
I'd prefer that, as with many things, we come up with our own syntax for specifying graphs. Gnuplot is not the most intuitive of programs, and ideally it would be possible for a non-technically-minded person to at least put together a simple graph.
hmm.
The problem with making your own syntax is that plotting is an extremely difficult task to get correct, and the programs are complicated for a reason..
still, I see value in a small subset of graphing functionality as being part of the core of mediawiki..
Actually, we might want to look into whether gnuplot is the best tool at all. If I remember correctly, it's damn near impossible to generate a histogram (bar graph) in gnuplot, and there's lots of other things that are basically hardcoded into it. I believe Erik Zachte was using another open-source plotting package, ploticus, for the wiki-stats page, which might be another option.
well, I've looked at ploticus - and looked at gnuplot - and they both have their strengths and weaknesses. Ploticus plots data better, wheras you can do various mathematical fits with gnuplot, as well as plot regular mathematical formulas and 3D graphs.
In any case, maybe the answer is having different prefixes for different programs.
graph:file.txt
for regular 'built in' graphing,
graph_gnuplot:file.txt
for gnuplot graphing, and
graph_ploticus:file.txt
for ploticus. In each case, file.txt would have to be a self-contained file which creates one PNG, which would then be named file.png.
Ultimately, the coolest thing would be plotting graphs by Adobe Illustrator, although I really don't know how you could do that (because Illustrator AFAIK does not have a command line interface). By *far* the coolest graphs are made with Illustrator, and they are suitable for high-process printing. Wheras plots with gnuplot and ploticus seem to only be 'servicable'.
Ed
( ps - just curious, but why isn't there a link to upload images, etc on the edit page? AFAIK you need to go to a totally separate page to upload things - it would be nice if there was a popup that let you do it whilst editing the page. )