wp-Octave, bringing the power of octave’s plotting capabilities to WordPress

Octave is powerful opensource clone of Mathworks Matlab which bring to the FOSS community most of the strengths of this power full tool. wp-Octave is a simple wordpress plugin that allows anyone with a basic knowledge of the matlab syntax to produce high quality plots of small (or not so small) sets of data and mathematical functions.

Example

Since you can easily find several good octave tutorials online, I’ll refrain from going in to its detailed descriptions (maybe I’ll get around to writting a “Octave for dummies” series). For example, if you simply type:

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x=1:15;
y=x.^2;
plot(x,y,'b-');

enclosed in matching [octave] and [/octave], you will be presented with (click on the image):

if you have the Thumbnail Viewer installed and that option selected on the preferences pane. If you turn on the thumbnail option without having “Thumbnail Viewer” installed, you’ll see (click on the image):

Otherwise, you would just get:

In any of the three cases, the output is wrapped in:

<div class="octave"></div>

so you can easily modify its appearance using CSS.

Installation

Now that I have (hopefully) convinced you to use wp-Octave for all your wordpress plotting needs and you are ready to getting your hands durty, it’s time to install it.

Installation is very straighforward (assuming you already have octave installed on your server):

1. Download the plugin file (attached to this post)
2. Upload it to your wp-content/plugins folder
3. Activate it.
4. Configure the options under wordpress’s Options panel. These should already be initialized to some sane values:



5. You should now have the full visualization and computation power of octave accessible to you on your favorite blogging platform.

Although any valid Octave program can be executed and the graphical output immediately displayed on your post, you will probably want to limit your use of octave to plotting and basic computation, under penalty of rendering your server unresponsive (and making your hosting company not particularly happy) till the end of the computation. This is even more so for smaller “under the desk” built at home servers.

Please leave any suggestions or feature requests in the comments section below.