Re: Object graphics axis

[James Tappin <sjt(at)star.sr.bham.ac.uk>]

David Fanning wrote:

>After spending literally hours trying to make *real*
>data show up in object graphics plots I threw up my
>hands and threw myself on the mercy of the IDL
>programmers who wrote the code. They supplied me
>with an algorithm, which with a few slight modifications
>to make it actually work, reliably creates the
>translation and scaling factors necessary to place
>a real data range into a particular view.

Lets just be realistic: IDL object graphics is a pretty toy, which might be
useful for drawing scenes etc, but for real scientific data it's the
proverbial heap of donkey dung. I would not like to try to write (for
example) a routine to time label an arbitrary axis which might be anything
from 2 minutes to 20 years in length with object graphics. [Anyone who wants
to see how its done in direct graphics (well; up to 10 years the externsion
to 25 hasn't been released yet) should go to:
http://www.sr.bham.ac.uk/hi-scale_help/routine_search.html

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+------------------------+-------------------------------+---------+
| James Tappin           | School of Physics & Astronomy |  O__    |
| sjt@star.sr.bham.ac.uk | University of Birmingham      | --  \/` |
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