Thanks all for the feedback! I have renamed it to TextPlot.jl, added
support for plotting just about any combination of
functions/vectors/matrix, made the API more flexible for Gadfly
compatibility, and greatly expanded the documentation/examples. It is now
quite a bit more powerful than
ASCIIPlots: https://github.com/sunetos/TextPlot.jl
Ivar: I like the idea of having this be a backend for one of the other
plotting packages, but the dependency would need to be the other direction.
Meaning, they would need to add support for TextPlot, not the other way
around. Right now TextPlot has zero dependencies, so you can use it in
basically any environment, including a console-only server connected over
SSH. Installing Gadfly requires quite a few dependencies on other packages,
including Cairo and other graphical packages if you want PNG charts (for
iTerm2+IPython inline charts, a similar use case to this one). TextPlot
would be quite useful for machines that cannot build all those other
packages, so I don't want to make TextPlot depend on any of those packages.
I think TextPlot is pretty capable already; please let me know if you can
think of anything it's missing!
On Friday, May 23, 2014 5:24:50 AM UTC-4, Ivar Nesje wrote:
>
> Yes, that was definitely my intention to suggest. It looks to me like
> ASCIIPlots.jl and DotPlot.jl solves the same problem in a very similar way,
> and whether to use Unicode for higher resolution seems like something I
> would expect to be an option.
>
> Anyway, the ultimate goal for ASCII art plots, would be to implement it as
> a backend for one of the normal plotting packages.
>
> Ivar
>
> kl. 10:06:42 UTC+2 fredag 23. mai 2014 skrev Tobias Knopp følgende:
>>
>> I think "merge" was meant as: Lets create one uniform package and join
>> the efforts. Since ASCIIPlots is not actively maintained I think it would
>> be really great if you could take the lead to make an awsome text plotting
>> tool.
>>
>> I like the name TextPlot by the way.
>>
>> Am Donnerstag, 22. Mai 2014 17:42:06 UTC+2 schrieb Adam Smith:
>>>
>>> TextPlot seems like a good name.
>>>
>>> Thanks for the offer on merging, but again, there's really nothing to
>>> merge. Adding scatterplots to dotplot will be trivial; I'll do that soon
>>> (making dotplot's features a superset of ASCIIPlots). There is nothing
>>> compatible/overlapping between these two (small) codebases for merging to
>>> make sense.
>>>
>>> I would be curious what John Myles White thinks about a more complete
>>> terminal plotting package for Julia. ASCIIPlots clearly imitates Matlab's
>>> plotting functions ("imagesc"), and I was going for something closer to
>>> Mathematica or Maple (which are more symbolic-oriented than Matlab), since
>>> I think the syntax is prettier. However, I know a large portion of Julia's
>>> users are also Matlab users, so if Matlab-compatibility is a goal, you may
>>> want to keep the packages separate.
>>>
>>> On Thursday, May 22, 2014 11:25:01 AM UTC-4, Leah Hanson wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Maybe something like TextPlot would be a good merged name? It conveys
>>>> what the package does (text plots) rather than how it does it (Braille
>>>> characters).
>>>>
>>>> Having a more complete plotting package for the terminal would move
>>>> towards having a way to make `plot` just work when you start up a Julia
>>>> REPL, which I think is a goal. I'd be happy to help merge them, but
>>>> probably won't have time for a couple weeks.
>>>>
>>>> -- Leah
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Thu, May 22, 2014 at 7:49 AM, Adam Smith <[email protected]>wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> I'm not totally opposed to it, but my initial reaction is not to:
>>>>>
>>>>> 1. I don't necessarily agree about the name. I personally think
>>>>> "dot plot" has a nice ring to it, and it is a more accurate
>>>>> description of
>>>>> what it does (using Braille characters). This very specifically
>>>>> exploits
>>>>> Unicode (non-ASCII) characters, so calling it an ASCII plot would be
>>>>> misleading (for those who want the restricted character set for some
>>>>> reason).
>>>>> 2. There's not really a single line of code they have in common,
>>>>> so there's nothing to "merge": it would just be a rename. I didn't
>>>>> look at
>>>>> the code of ASCIIPlots before making it, and we chose completely
>>>>> different
>>>>> APIs. For example, ASCIIPlots doesn't have a way to plot functions,
>>>>> and
>>>>> DotPlot doesn't (yet) have a way to scatterplot an array.
>>>>> 3. They are both quite small and simple (dotplot is ~100 lines of
>>>>> code, ascii is ~250); merging would probably be more work than either
>>>>> originally took to create.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> On Thursday, May 22, 2014 1:31:10 AM UTC-4, Ivar Nesje wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Would it make sense to merge this functionality into ASCIIPlots? To
>>>>>> me that seems like a better name, and John Myles White is likely to be
>>>>>> willing to transfer the repository if you want to be the maintainer.
>>>>>> That
>>>>>> package started from code posted on the mailing list, and the author
>>>>>> thought it was a joke. John packaged it for others to use.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>
