On Mon, Aug 30, 2004 at 03:59:54PM -0400, Delirium wrote:
Edward Peschko wrote:
> 1) 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.
)