This documentation is a revision of the original documentation[1] with a new title.
The Python Gist Scientific Graphics Package, written by
Lee Busby and Zane Motteler of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory,
is a set of Python modules for production of general scientific graphics.
The Python Gist module gist.py and the associated Python extension
gistCmodule.c provide a Python interface to the Gist library and
is referred to as `PyGist.'
Gist is a scientific graphics library written in C by David H. Munro of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. It features support for three common graphics output devices: X-Windows, (color) Postscript, and ANSI/ISO Standard Compute Graphics Metafile (CGM). The library is small (written directly to Xlib), portable, efficient, and full-featured. It produces x-y plots with ``good'' tick marks and tick labels, 2D quadrilateral mesh plots with contours, filled contours, vector fields, or pseudocolor maps on such meshes, and a selection of 3D plots, including wire mesh plots (transparent or opaque), shaded and colored surface plots, isosurface and plane cross sections of meshes containing data, and real-time animation (moving-light sources and rotations. The 3D library is packaged separately as the `Gist3D' module.
The original Python Gist module utilized the ``Numerical'' package due to J. Hugunin and others. PyGist is therefore fast and able to handle large datasets. The Gist module includes an X-windows event dispatcher which can be dynamically added to the Python interpreter. This makes fast mouse-controlled zoom, pan, and other graphic operations available to the researcher while maintaining the usual Python command-line interface.