On Wed, Sep 28, 2011 at 9:17 AM, Stefano Avallone
Hi,
I read in the Octave documentation [1] that a newer (than gnuplot) plotting capability is provided by the FLTK/OpenGL backend. This new backend is not available in the current octave arch package, because the fltk library is required to be installed at build time.
I read that the FLTK backend is rather faster (for 3d plots) than the gnuplot backend, and also some options (e.g., Postscript level 3 or pdflatex outputs of the print command) are only available with the new backend.
I installed fltk from extra and recompiled octave. The new backend seems to work fine and it is also enables to zoom (or rotate) and pan the current plot.
I don't know if the addition of the FLTK backend has been discussed in the past and abandoned for some reasons, but I see no issues in including it, since the default backend seems to still be gnuplot. So, adding the support for the FLTK backend would be as simple as putting fltk in makedepends and optdepends.
Should I open a bug to track this feature request?
there's already a bug report: https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/25913
regards, Stefano
[1] http://www.gnu.org/software/octave/doc/interpreter/Introduction-to- Plotting.html#Introduction-to-Plotting