GSoC/2016/StatusReports/Prakritibhardwaj

Title: Labplot - Theme Manager

LabPlot is a well known open source application mainly used for analyzing and visualizing scientific data. It provides an interactive graphical interface which allows the user to play around with a number of possibilities to plot their data. LabPlot also makes it easy for the user to manage and make changes to their plots. Also, user gets the flexibility to either write data into a spreadsheet or import it from external sources. Some of the existing features in LabPlot are to export plots, stack plots in a single view, color plots, label and adjust axis.

Project Status

Completed

LabPlot is now equipped with a very well developed ‘Theme Manager’ providing a wide variety of 13 themes from basic to more advanced such as Solarized, SolarizedLight, DarkPastels, BlackOnWhite, BlueOnBlack, etc. which are also comparable to other existing applications. Currently, the Theme Manager has many useful functionalities such as application of themes on plots, saving personalized themes, uploading/downloading themes to share themes via web server (in progress). I believe current functionalities will make LabPlot a powerful tool to visualize scientific data as well as it will enrich the overall user experience and usability.

If interested, you can find the developments and code at this Github link: https://github.com/KDE/labplot/commits/thememanager

Future directions

Currently, this project has provided flexibility of creating, saving and applying themes on 2D plots and in future this scope can be extended to accommodate 3D plots as well.
For the improvement of themes preview panel, a functionality can be developed to temporarily create a copy of the current plot and apply the properties of a theme on it. This can be used to show a preview of the user's plot with theme applied.

What I learned during GsoC?

Git
Brushed up C++ concepts
Created a better understanding of Qt and KDE frameworks
Learned about visualizing themes and their color palettes for 2D plots

Further details and achievements of this project are discussed in my blog at: https://prakritibhardwajblog.wordpress.com/2016/08/23/labplot-theme-manager-gsoc16-final-evaluations/

I now look forward to continue my contribution to Labplot and to the KDE community as a whole.