3d plotting tool

By dedekind at Sat, Jul 26 2008 10:00am |

Scientific Programming

To me it is clear that the proprietary apps (Matlab, Maple, Mathematica) can create the most beautiful 3d surfaces. Those apps are not worth buying though, in my opinion. See 3rd paragraph of this post for my reason.

I just find it pity to buy such a whole app just if I'm only interested in 3d surface plotting. I'm interested in using my C++ code to generate a CSV file with the surface points, and then put that file into a 3d plotting tool that allows for rotation, exporting to a vector-based PDF file, and supports inclusion of LaTeX's Computer Modern fonts (both for the numbers on the axes and the axis labels; meaning that the axis labels should be allowed to be named with beautiful LaTeX formulas in the standard LaTeX font, and that the numbering should also be done with that same font in the final PDF output; this means that pdflatex would probably have to run during the PDF output process and that what we see on-screen in the app would just be an approximation of the final beautiful result).

Anyone know of such an app out there? It should be pure Cocoa. I hate these proprietary apps that you pay thousands of bucks for, but still they don't even have the look and feel of a pure Mac app. They are just some lousy X11 ports and don't behave as true Mac OS X citizens. I dislike it. Not worth paying a nickel for. Not to mention thousands of dollars.

Can anyone help me out?

Sat, 2008-07-26 16:29 — lbland

RE: 3d plotting tool

There is: http://www.vvidget.org/builder/description/screenshots.html

It is:

(a) Free (with for cost add-ons).

(b) Pure Cocoa (as much as it is).

(d) Allows real-time rotation in 3d using the UI roll,pitch,yaw dials. Has a pro-stereoscopic app (requires prism glasses) with 3d rotation.

(e) Uses vector graphics (unlimited resolution), fonts on your system, and exports to PDF.

(f) Has a programmable code component.

(g) Is 64-bits/Intel and is compiled with the latest Xcode 3.1 toolset (oops, in the next version!)

Now, admittedly it does a whole lot of stuff, but also does not do a whole lot of stuff. Simply because there is a whole lot of stuff to the Nth power (but we are working on more!)

thanks!-

-lance

Sat, 2008-07-26 22:28 — dedekind

Thanks for the suggestion.

Thanks for the suggestion. Looks very good!

However, what about the (La)TeX thing I mentioned.
Any plans to add that? It is always lovely to have the
same font on graphs as the Computer Modern of
the surrounding thesis text made in LaTeX :)

Sun, 2008-07-27 06:06 — lbland