Gifplot

Jesus M. Castagnetto writes: > Was playing w/ Swing today, and found an "example" which is in reality a really > coold 2D/3D plotting lib called GIFPlot (in the Examples/GIFPlot dir of the > swig source). > Glad to hear that you like it :-). It's always been a bit of an easter-egg in the SWIG distribution... > What is really nice is that there are examples of creating an extension for > PHP, so you can use the GIFPlot lib in your scripts. There are 3 examples, one > which implements all the functions in the lib, another that implements them as > objects (including their PHP wrapper classes), and one that implements the > minimal set of functions. > > Perhaps there'll be some interest in having this in PEAR's PECL > (cvs.php.net/cvs.php/pear/PECL? We will have to talk to the original writer and > see what he thinks (I am cc'ing him this msg). > > Just tested the PHP examples and they work nicely. I don't have any particular concerns about the use of GIFPlot in other packages as long as there is some kind of credit or acknowledgement that indicates its original source. The only concern, which applies more to you than to me, is that there are patent restrictions on the LZW compression algorithm used in GIF encoding. Because of this GIFPlot has been intentially crippled to produce sub-optimal GIF files (you will find that they are much larger than they should be). Eventually, I may convert the library to produce PNG files, but I would need to find some time to work on it. The GIF patent might even expire before I get around it :-). Cheers, Dave