[arch-general] Enable FLTK Octave backend?

[Eric Bélanger]

On Wed, Sep 28, 2011 at 9:17 AM, Stefano Avallone <stavallo at unina.it> wrote:
> 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
>