Re: Octave under Windows in a teaching environment.

[Michael Goffioul]

On 1/8/08, Yann Le Du <address@hidden> wrote:
> Now Octave runs ok, except for some annoying problems, which, I think it
> is important to add, DO NOT OCCUR ON ALL COMPUTERS on which Octave was
> installed. Some of the problems are :
>
> 1/ the text in legends in plots is not displayed ;
> 2/ saving the plot to a file doesn't write the axis labels or legends ;

It would help to know in which circumstances this happen: which
distribution, which graphics backend, which label string...
There used to be a problem with font settings and gnuplot/wxt/pango
and the easy workaround was to redefine the default text fontname to *:
set (0, 'defaulttextfontname', '*') in the octave startup script

> 3/ the Octave window crashes badly sometimes when Ctrl-C is used during a
> computation ;
> 4/ closing the Octave window with the x close button causes systematic
> crash of the application.

These problems are known and related to the way Win32 handle signals
internally. The code within octave to do this is tricky and honestly I don't
understand it, but it's far more complex than the Linux version. There's
no solution for the moment. What you can tell to your students is to
quit octave cleanly by typing "quit" or "exit" at octave prompt and avoid
using the x close button. For the CTRL-C problem, I don't have a
workaround, you'll have to live with it. My guess is that it will be easier
to tackle these problems when octave will run within a real GUI instead
of the Windows console (Matlab does not run in the windows console
neither, does it?)

Michael.