forge functions not working and zoom

[John W. Eaton]

On 10-Apr-2007, Mats Hedlund wrote:

| I just upgraded to debian package of 2.9.10 (from 2.9.8) on my Ubuntu
| 6.10 machine.
| Somehow octave is not recognizing any octave-forge functions
| (2006.07.09+dfsg1-8), first noticed running an old script that uses
| textread. It can't find textread (and anything else). Does anyone
| recognize this and have any hints for a fix? Maybe a particular problem
| with the debian package not linking properly?
| 
| Also, as I've seen reported here before, the zoom function (I'm using
| gnuplot 4.0 and the set mouse trick) is not working. Did anyone found a
| fix? From the discussions it seemed like there is a more major issue
| with gnuplot 4.2 but that 4.0 should be able to work??? Please help
| clarify the status on this zoom issue. I REALLY use that zoom a lot...

Previous versions of Octave saved data to a temporary file, then sent the
filename to gnuplot.  But that caused trouble because there was no way
for Octave to know when it was safe to delete the temporary file.  To
fix that problem, Octave now sends all data to gnuplot in the same
stream that is used for plotting commands.  That avoids the need for
temporary files, but unfortunately, gnuplot is unable to zoom with the
mouse when it is used this way.  So when the problem is fixed in
gnuplot, zooming will work again.  But given the long release cycle of
gnuplot, I don't expect a fix soon (but maybe a gnuplot developer is
reading this and would like to comment).

jwe