Re: Native TikZ backend?

[Søren Hauberg]

lor, 11 07 2009 kl. 09:53 -0400, skrev John W. Eaton:
> On 11-Jul-2009, Soren Hauberg wrote:
> 
> | I'm not sure it's better if you're using gnuplot. But it seems to me
> | that minor things get dropped when routing things through gnuplot from
> | Octave. We have to express our plots within the limitations of gnuplot,
> | which means that sometimes you don't get what you asked for. E.g.
> | sometimes you don't get the markers on your plot that you asked for in
> | Octave. We should be able to avoid such issues if we don't send things
> | through gnuplot in the first place.
> 
> OK, predictible markers would be good.  What about mixing line colors
> and dashed lines?

The code I sent, supports RGB colours, solid, dotted, and dashed lines
(no dot-dashed support, but that should be doable). It also supports
most markers (the ones missing should be trivial to add).

> | That being said, I'm not sure if it is worth spending time on such a
> | backend.
> 
> It would just be for printing, right?  You would still need the OpenGL
> backend to generate plots for the screen?

Yes. The code just generates a .tex file you can include in your LaTeX
documents. You could write scripts that did this, called pdflatex, and
started a pdf viewer, but would be overkill.

> But it could be worth the effort because I don't know that we
> currently have a way to generate high quality output for printing when
> using the OpenGL backend.

We should be able to get raster output fairly easy from the OpenGL
backend. And since we have image writing capabilities (via
GraphicsMagick) in Octave, it should be possible to create such files
fairly easy. For PS/PDF output, I think Michael used GL2PS [1] in
JHandles, but I don't know how good the output was quality-wise.

Soren

[1] http://www.geuz.org/gl2ps/