Re: looking ahead to 3.6

[Ben Abbott]

On Feb 11, 2011, at 3:16 PM, John W. Eaton wrote:

>  * Make the current FLTK+OpenGL plotting system work better so that
>    we can make it the default.  For this to happen, there are a lot
>    of little bugs that need to be fixed, plus we need to make
>    printing reliable.  If possible, we need to make printing work
>    even when a plot is not displayed on the screen.

My understanding is that gl2ps requires the figure be displayed to print. Does 
this imply that gl2ps needs significant modification, or we need to adopt a 
different library? I have no experience with it, but MathGL looks like it can 
do everything needed.

        http://mathgl.sourceforge.net/en/features.html

        * Output: PNG, JPEG, BMP, EPS, and SVG
        * Display: Qt, FLTK, OpenGL
        * TeX-like symbol parsing

For the time being, we could ...

(1) Disable printing (accompanied by a warning) for figures using OpenGL 
backends when their "visible" property is set "off". 

        or

(2) Temporarily make the figure visible when __fltk_print__ is called.

> Comments?  Additions?

This is really unrelated to 3.6, but I've come to like WikiMedia sites. Might 
we Wikify Octave.org & Octave-Forge?

Merging Octave with Octave-Forge and incorporating it all into a Wiki sounds 
attractive to me. We would be able to ensure a consistent look, and make it 
easier for volunteers to contribute to documentation.

Ben