Re: Gnuplot 4.6

[Ben Abbott]

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