On Tue, 20 Apr 2004, Malcolm J. Currie wrote:
> > Right, okay, I've looked. Personally I wouldn't got the way of putting
> > this into TOPCAT. It doesn't look like the right place. I'd use the Perl
> > AST bindings to do this sort of thing. It's far to hard to do stuff like
> > this in a GUI, it really needs a programatic interface.
>
> The code need not go into TOPCAT itself. However, being able to plot
> distributions on the sky of selected objects, symbol/colour coded on
> some other field, from catalogues is clearly, IMHO, part of TOPCAT's
> remit.
I agree that plotting catalogues is a requirement.
>
> I've found doing annotations harder programmatically. For example,
> isn't it easier to annotate a plot in SPLAT or GAIA interactively than
> invoking AST routines. Users won't want to have to play with AST
> routines or ATOOLS, intimidated by the chunky manuals and
> computer-science concepts. Once they've selected their objects in
> TOPCAT they want to produce a plot. They don't have to play with AST
> routines for a KAPPA:DISPLAY of image data with a grid, why should they
> for tabular information?
Al, Brad and I were really really close to getting AST plotting into
perldl (that's interactive). That got delayed when Al's visit to Hawaii
finished and I switched my effort to CVS.
--
Tim Jenness
JAC software
http://www.jach.hawaii.edu/~timj
|