[vtkusers] Question on Viewports/vtkChartXY/SetGeometry in example TestMultipleChartRenderers.cxx

[Marcus D. Hanwell]

Hi Daniel,

2010/11/30 Frese Daniel Dr. <frese at heidenhain.de>:
> Hello Marcus,
>
> thank you for your fast answer. Such a feature (multiple graphs - maybe also images ? -
> in one scene) would be very useful. As I understand it now, this basically means that
> there are still some open issues in the 2D API, which you are working on.

Multiple images is already possible, the charts have the issue that
they always grow to fill the scene. So there is some extra code that
needs to go in there to allow that behavior to be toggled. The charts
themselves have child items in the scene (the axes, plots etc), and so
make full use of the scene.
>
> We are looking here for some visualization kit for some very basic 3D stuff, but mainly
> to look at some XY charts and some matrix data - and for this your 2D API looks
> very nice ! So I try to figure out, whether it makes sense for our purposes
> to use VTK and the 2D API for this. Two questions on this :
>
> - Is there anywhere some kind of overview, which areas of this API are still work
> in progress, and which are already more stable ? That would help me (as a newbie)
> trying desperately to get some things running, while they simply don't work the
> expected way yet...

I will see if I can put something together, this wiki page does not
yet exist. The VTK examples, and the tests in Charts/Testing/ give
many examples of what works, along with ParaView which uses the VTK
charts in its GUI (you can download binaries and see what it already
exposed).
>
> - I know this a difficult one, but what are the priorities on the 2D API stuff ?
> Is there some kind of target date as when things will kind of settle down ?
> Does it make sense for me, to check out sources regularly via git ? So far I use the
> 5.6.1 release.

I think it would make sense to check out the source via git. I am
working on several new features, there is an article in the Source,

http://www.kitware.com/products/html/NewChartAPIInVTK.html

We have a new release (VTK 5.8), and I will be getting things ready
for that release. There are a few new chart types, along with the work
we are doing on Marks (Protovis like API in C++ over the 2D API/2D
scene). I monitor the mailing lists, but will see about making a high
level summary of this work. I will post to the list when I do so.

There are a few topic branches I am getting ready to merge into VTK
master for things like 2D histograms (color maps), fixed size charts
(enabling multiple charts with interaction in one scene).

Marcus