Re: Gnuplot 4.6

[Ben Abbott]

On Dec 14, 2013, at 11:50 AM, Juan Pablo Carbajal <address@hidden> wrote:

> On Sat, Dec 14, 2013 at 5:36 PM, Ben Abbott <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
>> On Dec 14, 2013, at 7:16 AM, Juan Pablo Carbajal <address@hidden> wrote:
>> 
>>> Hi Ben,
>>> 
>>> I have seem some amazing improvements on gnuplot quality by adding the
>>> cairo library. Is GNU Octave exploiting this extended features
>>> already?
>>> http://gnuplot.sourceforge.net/demo_svg/
>> 
>> I don't think so. When I rewrote the print functionality to allow for 
>> multiple toolkits, I tried to streamline everything as much as possible to 
>> reduce maintenance and bugs. My approach was to have the print() behave 
>> similarly for all toolkits.  Unless there are changes I'm unaware of, the 
>> FLTK and gnuplot toolkits each begin by creating a eps-file and then convert 
>> it to the desired format using epstool, epstoedit, transfig, and/or 
>> ghostscript.
>> 
>> For gnuplot, it is possible to do things differently, but there will be 
>> other features.  For example, the linestyles and markertypes are not 
>> consistent across different terminals.  Surprisingly even the fontsize may 
>> change across different terminals (specifying a fontsize of 12 points 
>> doesn't always mean you'll get a a font with a size of 12 points).  All of 
>> this manageable, but since these features are opportunities for bugs, I 
>> choose to avoid them in the initial implementation.
>> 
>> Ben
> 
> Do you think is possible to have the cairo terminal as an option for
> the gnuplot toolkit?

I'm not clear on the details of what you'd like to do.

If you just want to switch from "set term postscript eps ..." to "set term 
epscairo ...", that should be fairly straight forward.  The 
__gnuplot_has_feature__() function will likely need to be modified to check if 
the epscairo terminal is supported.  And the "set term ..." command will need 
to be modified to support the syntax for epscairo.  The terminal commands are 
below.

 set terminal postscript {landscape | portrait | eps}
        {enhanced | noenhanced}
        {defaultplex | simplex | duplex}
        {fontfile [add | delete] "<filename>" | nofontfiles} 
{{no}adobeglyphnames}
        {level1 | leveldefault}
        {color | colour | monochrome}
        {background <rgbcolor> | nobackground}
        {solid | dashed}
        {dashlength | dl <DL>}
        {linewidth | lw <LW>}
        {rounded | butt}
        {clip | noclip}
        {palfuncparam <samples>{,<maxdeviation>}}
        {size <XX>{unit},<YY>{unit}}
        {blacktext | colortext | colourtext}
        {{font} "fontname{,fontsize}" {<fontsize>}}
        {fontscale <scale>}

set term epscairo ...
        {{no}enhanced} {mono|color} {solid|dashed}
        {font <font>} {fontscale <scale>}
        {linewidth <lw>} {rounded|butt} {dashlength <dl>}
         {size <XX>{unit},<YY>{unit}}

Ben