gnuplot-beta — Developers and beta testers of new gnuplot code

Re: What's left for a 4.2 release?

[Ethan M. <merritt@u.washington.edu>]

On Friday 09 June 2006 05:23 pm, Timoth=E9e Lecomte wrote:
>     - work on the patches/feature requests that are worth it for 4.2,
> are then declare the feature freeze, and sort/solve reported bugs

We had better freeze it quickly, before Bastian Maerkisch thinks
of 25 more nice features to add :-)

Seriously, I am tempted to include the configuration option
   ./configure --with-readline=3Dbsd
because it addresses a recurring issue about readline support.
Apparently there are multiple versions of libeditline that are
compatible with this option (in the sense that ./configure will
find them and gnuplot will build).  These various versions may
differ in how well they work, but that is out of our control.
We can always add a FAQ or status page describing them later,
since it doesn't really affect the configuration option itself.

But it's a slippery slope.=20
I was about ready to close the door on any further addition of
features prior to a freeze. The only features left on my list were:
    #1117724     [fit] access to resulting chisquare
    #1488448     User-available GPVAL_ variables

The --with-readline=3Dbsd configuration option from Bastian is
    #1504831  	 support for NetBSDs editline

Petr has suggested also including
    #1027032      Connect gnuplot_x11 to exterior application
But I don't think this is polished yet (mousing is very problematic)
and I'd rather leave it out than include a broken version that=20
can't be fixed later without breaking backwards compatibility.

And I'm about to add one that is more a matter of internal
documentation that a bugfix or feature:

    #########	Could someone please go through the various
		new configuration options, and add their status
		(+/-) to the output of "show version long"?

=2D-=20
Ethan A Merritt
Biomolecular Structure Center
University of Washington, Seattle WA

Re: set style rectangle

[Ethan M. <merritt@u.washington.edu>]

On Tuesday 13 June 2006 07:59 am, Mojca Miklavec wrote:
>
> Thanks for explanation. I built from sources from the time just
> before CVS "crashed". I don't know when exactly this was, but this
> might be the reason. I didn't turn off anything explicitely. I'll
> check again.

I think I see the problem.
The ./configure script enables all of our various new options
by default, so that they get tested.  However, the MSwin and other
makefiles in ./config/  do not necessarily select all of these
options.

You probably need to add
 -DEAM_OBJECTS

to whatever makefile or config file you are using,
See for example
  config/makefile.oww
  config/config.os2

-- 
Ethan A Merritt
Biomolecular Structure Center
University of Washington, Seattle WA

Re: set style rectangle

[Mojca M. <moj...@gm...>]

On 6/13/06, Ethan A Merritt wrote:
> On Monday 12 June 2006 12:40 pm, Mojca Miklavec wrote:
> > Many demo files include lines like
> >     set style rectangle back fc lt -3 fillstyle  solid 1.00 border -1
>
> Many?
> There is exactly one demo file that illustrates the use of
> 'set obj rectangle'.
>
> > which doesn't really work (fails on "rectangle").
> > Is something wrong with my gnuplot binary or is there something else
> > I'm missing here?
>
> I don't know. The "set style rectangle" and "set object rectangle"
> commands were added recently (March 2006), so you might have a
> binary that is older.  But then you shouldn't have the demo file
> either.  Or perhaps someone built your binary from a recent
> source tree, but decided to turn off the support for rectangles.

Thanks for explanation. I built from sources from the time just before
CVS "crashed". I don't know when exactly this was, but this might be
the reason. I didn't turn off anything explicitely. I'll check again.

Mojca

Re: set style rectangle

[Ethan A M. <merritt@u.washington.edu>]

On Monday 12 June 2006 12:40 pm, Mojca Miklavec wrote:
> Many demo files include lines like
>     set style rectangle back fc lt -3 fillstyle  solid 1.00 border -1

Many?
There is exactly one demo file that illustrates the use of 
'set obj rectangle'.
 
> which doesn't really work (fails on "rectangle").
> Is something wrong with my gnuplot binary or is there something else
> I'm missing here?

I don't know. The "set style rectangle" and "set object rectangle"
commands were added recently (March 2006), so you might have a 
binary that is older.  But then you shouldn't have the demo file
either.  Or perhaps someone built your binary from a recent
source tree, but decided to turn off the support for rectangles.


-- 
Ethan A Merritt
Biomolecular Structure Center
University of Washington, Seattle 98195-7742

set style rectangle

[Mojca M. <moj...@gm...>]

Hello,

Many demo files include lines like
    set style rectangle back fc lt -3 fillstyle  solid 1.00 border -1

which doesn't really work (fails on "rectangle").
Is something wrong with my gnuplot binary or is there something else
I'm missing here?

Thanks,
    Mojca

Re: bin_hook.o and binary.o in makefile.all

[<tim...@en...>]

Daniel J Sebald wrote:
> I suppose the best thing is that based upon BINARY_DATA_FILE in=20
> ./configure, the file binary.c would or wouldn't be present in the=20
> list where bin_hook.c is. That is:
> gnuplot_SOURCES =3D alloc.c alloc.h ansichek.h axis.c axis.h bin_hook.c=
 \
> breaders.c breaders.h bitmap.c bitmap.h color.c color.h command.c \...
>
> becomes
>
> gnuplot_SOURCES =3D alloc.c alloc.h ansichek.h axis.c axis.h binary.c \
> breaders.c breaders.h bitmap.c bitmap.h color.c color.h command.c \...
>
> or
>
> gnuplot_SOURCES =3D alloc.c alloc.h ansichek.h axis.c axis.h \
> breaders.c breaders.h bitmap.c bitmap.h color.c color.h command.c \...
>
> whichever is appropriate.  I don't know how to do that in configure.
>  =20
You add in configure.in, just after the "if test=20
"$enable_binary_data_file" =3D yes ... fi" code :

   AM_CONDITIONAL(BUILD_BINARY_C, test "$enable_binary_data_file" =3D yes=
)

And in src/Makefile.am, you add :

    if BUILD_BINARY_C
        gnuplot_SOURCES +=3D binary.c
    endif
 =20
This is (one of) the standard way(s) to do conditional compilation=20
according to the autotools doc.

Timoth=E9e

Re: bin_hook.o and binary.o in makefile.all

[Daniel J S. <dan...@ie...>]

Ethan A Merritt wrote:
> On Saturday 10 June 2006 10:33 am, Petr Mikulik wrote:
> 
>>Somebody has added new file bin_hook.o into makefile.all. 
> 
> 
> Huh?  It was added in 2004.
> 
> 
>>This strange file  
>>does just #include "binary.c". Consequently, makefiles including 
>>makefile.all fail to link gnuplot because of multiple definitions from 
>>bin_hook.o and binary.o (e.g. makefile.mgw).

Hmm, that seems like something isn't programmed correctly.  What platform is makefile.mgw, i.e., what variables are defined for the compilation you are trying?


> According to the ChangeLog comment, bin_hook.o was supposed to replace
> binary.o

Yes, well not so much replace, but be a form of conditionally including binary.c.  But it does replace binary.c in the list of

gnuplot_SOURCES = alloc.c alloc.h ansichek.h axis.c axis.h bin_hook.c \
breaders.c breaders.h bitmap.c bitmap.h color.c color.h command.c \...


> 
>>Which one to remove from makefile.all? Or another action to take?
> 
> 
> But you are correct. That doesn't seem to be what really happened.
> So far as I can tell, bin_hook is not used anywhere and should
> be deleted altogether. Both the source file and the mention of it in
> the Makefiles are superfluous.
> 
> Daniel:
> 	This was your addition, correct?

Yes, that was from pretty far back.  I don't see how Lars' name got tied in with that.


>  Is it really correct
> that bin_hook is not referred to anywhere, in any source file?
> 
> I take it that the idea was to make inclusion of the routines in binary.o
> into the final executable be conditional on BINARY_DATA_FILE.

Yes, the reason for this hook is that binary.c is needed for two programs, that special C program to generate binary data and gnuplot in the case BINARY_DATA_FILE is not active.  When BINARY_DATA_FILE is active, from what I recall, a few extra lines of code achieved what the code in binary.c does.

The reason for the hook is that binary.c must be present for the bf_test.c program that generates binary data.  From the Makefile.am:

bf_test_SOURCES = bf_test.c binary.c binary.h alloc.c

so we can't put any type of defined conditional around the code inside binary.c, i.e., bf_test.c always needs it.  Hence, this bin_hook.c accomplishes the defined conditional for gnuplot while leaving the code compiled in binary.o for bf_test.

> It doesn't seem to have worked, and anyhow I don't think that is the
> proper way to do it.

There may be a better way.  I didn't put too much effort into a better method because I hoped that eventually gnuplot wouldn't need the code inside binary.c anymore, in which case binary.c could be dedicated simply to the C program for creating binary files (bf_test), and bin_hook.c would get the heav-ho from gnuplot_SOURCES.

>  The Makefiles produced by ./configure should either
> include binary.o, or not, depending on whether BINARY_DATA_FILE was selected.
> It should not require any extra source files.

I suppose the best thing is that based upon BINARY_DATA_FILE in ./configure, the file binary.c would or wouldn't be present in the list where bin_hook.c is.  That is:

gnuplot_SOURCES = alloc.c alloc.h ansichek.h axis.c axis.h bin_hook.c \
breaders.c breaders.h bitmap.c bitmap.h color.c color.h command.c \...

becomes

gnuplot_SOURCES = alloc.c alloc.h ansichek.h axis.c axis.h binary.c \
breaders.c breaders.h bitmap.c bitmap.h color.c color.h command.c \...

or

gnuplot_SOURCES = alloc.c alloc.h ansichek.h axis.c axis.h \
breaders.c breaders.h bitmap.c bitmap.h color.c color.h command.c \...

whichever is appropriate.  I don't know how to do that in configure.

Dan

Re: Parallel coordinate plot type?

[Niklas E. <el...@cs...>]

Thanks for all of your help. I will play around with especially the 
latter example you gave in your other response to this message.

Ethan Merritt wrote:
 > On Monday 12 June 2006 02:11 am, Niklas Elmqvist wrote:
 >> I am looking to create a parallel coordinate plot for a paper I am
 >> working on.
 >
 > I was not familiar with this plot type, so I did some Googling.
 > Is this an adequate description of what you want?
 >
 >   http://www.agocg.ac.uk/reports/visual/casestud/brunsdon/parallel.htm

That's right. It's commonly used in visualization of multidimensional 
data when you run out of the normal dimensions. Some relevant papers on 
this includes much of the recent information visualization papers, as 
well as the original work by Alfred Inselberg.

[snip]

 > I am intrigued by the plot mode, and will seriously consider
 > adding it as a supported plot type. It is similar in many ways
 > to the stacked histogram plot modes, so a model already exists
 > for its implementation in gnuplot.

Sounds great. I was fearing I would have to draw the diagram manually 
using xfig. My datasets are no massive, but that would still be painful.

/Niklas

+- Niklas Elmqvist (el...@cs...) ---------------------------+
|"Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him   |
| and he's warm for the rest of his life." - Terry Pratchett, Jingo|
+------------------------------------------------------------------+

Re: Parallel coordinate plot type?

[Ethan M. <merritt@u.washington.edu>]

On Monday 12 June 2006 11:07 am, Ethan Merritt wrote:
> On Monday 12 June 2006 02:11 am, Niklas Elmqvist wrote:
> > I am looking to create a parallel coordinate plot for a paper I am
> > working on.
>
> I was not familiar with this plot type, so I did some Googling.
> Is this an adequate description of what you want?
>
>  
> http://www.agocg.ac.uk/reports/visual/casestud/brunsdon/parallel.htm
>
> > I've started looking at using gnuplot for this purpose, but there
> > appears to be no PC plot type
>
> Correct, there is no such plot type in gnuplot.
> It does look quite interesting, however, so I encourage you to submit
> it as a "Feature Request" on gnuplot's SourceForge site.
>
> > Any ideas on how to achieve this? Using gnuplot or some other
> > (freely available) tool?
>
> I think it would not be very hard to tweak your input data file so
> that gnuplot can produce a reasonable approximation of what you want.

Doh!
It has occurred to me that if you forego the fancy labelling, etc,
then no special preparation of the data is needed, although I am 
not sure how well it handles missing entries in the vectors.
You can plot your data in one shot simply by saying:

    plot "datafile" matrix with lines


-- 
Ethan A Merritt
Biomolecular Structure Center
University of Washington, Seattle WA

Re: What's left for a 4.2 release?

[<br...@ph...>]

Timoth=E9e Lecomte wrote:
> Finally, I would like to document the dependencies of the wxt termi=
nal=20
> (wxWidgets, cairo, pango) in a small paragraph. Should this go in R=
EADME=20
> or README.1ST or somewhere else ?

README and/or INSTALL

> What should be considered a successful testing : a successful=20
> compilation=20

=2E.. with as many optional drivers / libraries added / removed from =
the=20
build as you can handle.  E.g. try a build with full GD (including JP=
EG,=20
  freetype and all that), WXT, optionally a second GUI terminal and P=
DF,=20
and a build with almost nothing but what you personally feel responsi=
ble=20
or predestined for (wxt for Thimothee, Aquaterm for Per, DJGPP+GRX2 f=
or=20
myself, OS2+PM for Petr)

 > with the default settings and a satisfying output for
> all.dem (which does not contain all the demos as far as I can tell)
> or make check when available ?=20

Make check should always be available (it basically runs 'all.dem'=
=20
through the default terminal non-interactively.  See demo/Makefile.am=
=20
for details).

Successful completion of 'all.dem' is a minimal requirement,=20
particularly for the default build.   Any bug that crashes a demo has=
 to=20
be reported at SF.net immediately, and had better be flagged=20
"release_critical".   Then have at least a quick go over the main=
=20
documentation (check that navigation generally works, ...), and read =
all=20
the READMEs and other texts that will become part of a binary=20
installation package at least once.

Re: wxWidgets terminal : XPM cursors and icons

[Ethan M. <merritt@u.washington.edu>]

On Wednesday 07 June 2006 12:47 am, Petr Mikulik wrote:
>
> BTW: if I resize the x11 graph window so that it is small, the font
> sizes are still the same. However, the distance between x-axis and
> x-tic values (same for y-) is very narrow and even they overlap. The
> wxt terminal works properly. What's the problem with x11?

wxt is built on top of a library that guarantees nice scalable fonts.
x11 is not.  Many x11 fonts these days _are_ scalable, but the driver
doesn't know which ones are and which ones are not.  This could be
changed, but I think it would require that some extra information is
passed:
	set term x11 scalable font "arial" 10

It is in any case a matter of taste whether the wxt behavior is
desirable or not.  Arguably if I specify a font size, I want that
size regardless of whether I manually resize the plot window later.

-- 
Ethan A Merritt
Biomolecular Structure Center
University of Washington, Seattle WA

Re: Parallel coordinate plot type?

[Ethan M. <merritt@u.washington.edu>]

On Monday 12 June 2006 02:11 am, Niklas Elmqvist wrote:
> I am looking to create a parallel coordinate plot for a paper I am
> working on. 

I was not familiar with this plot type, so I did some Googling.
Is this an adequate description of what you want?

  http://www.agocg.ac.uk/reports/visual/casestud/brunsdon/parallel.htm

> I've started looking at using gnuplot for this purpose, but there
> appears to be no PC plot type

Correct, there is no such plot type in gnuplot.
It does look quite interesting, however, so I encourage you to submit
it as a "Feature Request" on gnuplot's SourceForge site.

> Any ideas on how to achieve this? Using gnuplot or some other (freely
> available) tool?

I think it would not be very hard to tweak your input data file so
that gnuplot can produce a reasonable approximation of what you want.
If if understand correctly (which I may not) then your data consists
of a set of observations, each of which contains 5-10 associated values:

# Obs	#Val_1	#Val_2	#Val_3	...	#Val_10
###############################################
1	val1	-	val3		val10
2	val1	val2	val3		val10
3	val1	val2	val3		-
4	-	val2	val3		val10
...

I have marked missing values with a '-' character.
You want to plot this so that there is a line on the graph for each
observation, and that line passes through val1 at x=1, val2 at x=2,
and so on.  I hope I got that correctly.

The first issue is that gnuplot normally uses the x-axis to separate
the *row* entries rather than the  *column* entries.
So you probably will have to transpose the rows and columns of
your input data file, so that now it looks like this:

Dim	Obs1	Obs2	Obs3	...	Obs100
##############################################
Val_1	val1	val1	val1		val1
Val_2	-	val2	val2		val2
Val_3	val3	val3	val3		val3

At this point it is relatively simple to plot in gnuplot.
I will use auto-labelling commands from version 4.1, but
you could get the same plot in earlier versions by placing
the labels manually.
 
Your plot commands would be something like

set datafile missing '-'
set key autotitle columnheader
set key outside left

set xrange [0.5:10.5]       # Span the 10 dimensions
set auto y                  # y will scale itself

set style data line         # plot with lines, no points
                            # (lt -1) is thin black line

plot "datafile" using xticlabel(1):2 lt -1, \
     "" using 3 lt -1, \
     "" using 4 lt -1, \
     "" using 5 lt -1, \
...
     "" using 100 lt -1


The vertical bars can be added manually:

set arrow 1 from 1, graph 0 to 1, graph 1 nohead
set arrow 2 from 2, graph 0 to 2, graph 2 nohead
...
set arrow 10 from 10, graph 0 to 10, graph 10 nohead

If you have a scaling function for a particular dimension,
it can be defined and added as follows:

# Normalization function for dimension 2
f_2(g) =  (g - GMIN) / (GMAX-GMIN)
input_2(g) = ($0 == 3) ? f_2(g) : g        

plot "datafile" using xticlabel(1):(input_2($2)), \
     "" using (input_2($3)), \
     ...

> (Sorry if this is an obvious question, but I have cast around a bit
> and I did not find an obvious answer.)

Not so obvious, but quite possible.

I am intrigued by the plot mode, and will seriously consider
adding it as a supported plot type. It is similar in many ways
to the stacked histogram plot modes, so a model already exists
for its implementation in gnuplot.


-- 
Ethan A Merritt
Biomolecular Structure Center
University of Washington, Seattle WA

Parallel coordinate plot type?

[Niklas E. <el...@cs...>]

I am looking to create a parallel coordinate plot for a paper I am 
working on. However, most of the data visualization tools with parallel 
coordinate modes, such as GGobi, Mondrian and Manet, only seem to 
support interactive exploration and not output of the plots to some 
suitable vectorized format. (My data set is reasonably small, only about 
~30 data points with 5-10 dimensions.)

I've started looking at using gnuplot for this purpose, but there 
appears to be no PC plot type, and just plotting a normal diagram will 
obviously not produce satisfying results (unless I manually scale each 
dimension and edit in the axes afterwards).

Any ideas on how to achieve this? Using gnuplot or some other (freely 
available) tool?

(Sorry if this is an obvious question, but I have cast around a bit and 
I did not find an obvious answer.)

+- Niklas Elmqvist (el...@cs...) ---------------------------+
|"Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him   |
| and he's warm for the rest of his life." - Terry Pratchett, Jingo|
+------------------------------------------------------------------+

Re: What's left for a 4.2 release?

[Lars H. <lhe...@us...>]

 
> Well, guys, I'm afraid you may have missed the single most important 
> ingredient: somebody who has the time and nerve to actually process the 
> release.
 
 I should be available, if the release doesn't clash with our quarterly
 company audits.

Win 16bit

[Bastian M. <bma...@we...>]

There's hasn't been a build of gnuplot for 16bit Windows (3.x) for years
now. Shall we therefore remove the windows3.0 section from online help?

Bastian

Re: What's left for a 4.2 release?

[<tim...@en...>]

Ethan A Merritt wrote:
> There are a few more obvious things that everyone can help
> with:
>  - audit documentation to correctly describe what's new,
>    what's changed, etc
>  =20
I added "wxt" where needed in gnuplot.doc.
I will write a small entry describing the new terminal once the=20
"Changes" section of this file has been purged.
Finally, I would like to document the dependencies of the wxt terminal=20
(wxWidgets, cairo, pango) in a small paragraph. Should this go in README=20
or README.1ST or somewhere else ?
>  - run test builds on as many platforms as possible
>    (I've already done 32+64 bit linux, alpha/DU4, irix, VMS)
>  =20
What should be considered a successful testing : a successful=20
compilation with the default settings
and a satisfying output for all.dem (which does not contain all the=20
demos as far as I can tell) or make check when available ?
If it's the case, then it is working on Windows/MinGW.

Best regards,

Timoth=E9e

Re: What's left for a 4.2 release?

[Petr M. <mi...@ph...>]

I vote to add all of these:

   1)  BUG 1488168        z_floor and z_ceiling based on xyplane.absolute
   3)  PATCH 1494573      check number of variables for u.d. functions
   4)  PATCH 1499728      revamped stat.inc
   5)  PATCH 1027032      Connect gnuplot_x11 to exterior application window

6) #1488448     User-available GPVAL_ variables
   This one is finished but I will commit it when Hans-Bernhard adds an item
   to the axis struct keeping the unlogged value of min,max to avoid
   an ambiguity for log axes.

7) 
=>   #1461275     Japanese translation of faq.tex
=>   #1460418     Japanese Manuals
   These are just to be added.

8) 1218873 Change text rotating angle from int to float
   Seems to be ready.


Others (yet unimplemented):

A) unset termoptions
    Currently, a command to reset all options of a terminal is missing.

B) png/ppm/pgm: Could these wide-spread "binary matrix" formats be read?

---
PM

Re: bin_hook.o and binary.o in makefile.all

[<br...@ph...>]

Petr Mikulik wrote:
> Somebody has added new file bin_hook.o into makefile.all. 

"Somebody" was actually Lars Hecking (--> "cvs annotate" helps to find 
out such things), or, to be more precise, Lars just checked in what the 
automatic mechanism in src/Makefile.maint generates.

This is one of those pitfalls that tend to show up only when we gear up 
for a release cycle --- auto-maintenance techniques never used in 
between releases suddenly turn out to need maintenance of their own.

Re: bin_hook.o and binary.o in makefile.all

[Ethan A M. <merritt@u.washington.edu>]

On Saturday 10 June 2006 10:33 am, Petr Mikulik wrote:
> Somebody has added new file bin_hook.o into makefile.all. 

Huh?  It was added in 2004.

> This strange file  
> does just #include "binary.c". Consequently, makefiles including 
> makefile.all fail to link gnuplot because of multiple definitions from 
> bin_hook.o and binary.o (e.g. makefile.mgw).

According to the ChangeLog comment, bin_hook.o was supposed to replace
binary.o

> Which one to remove from makefile.all? Or another action to take?

But you are correct. That doesn't seem to be what really happened.
So far as I can tell, bin_hook is not used anywhere and should
be deleted altogether. Both the source file and the mention of it in
the Makefiles are superfluous.

Daniel:
	This was your addition, correct?  Is it really correct
that bin_hook is not referred to anywhere, in any source file?

I take it that the idea was to make inclusion of the routines in binary.o
into the final executable be conditional on BINARY_DATA_FILE.
It doesn't seem to have worked, and anyhow I don't think that is the
proper way to do it.  The Makefiles produced by ./configure should either
include binary.o, or not, depending on whether BINARY_DATA_FILE was selected.
It should not require any extra source files. 

-- 
Ethan A Merritt
Biomolecular Structure Center
University of Washington, Seattle 98195-7742

bin_hook.o and binary.o in makefile.all

[Petr M. <mi...@ph...>]

Somebody has added new file bin_hook.o into makefile.all. This strange file 
does just #include "binary.c". Consequently, makefiles including 
makefile.all fail to link gnuplot because of multiple definitions from 
bin_hook.o and binary.o (e.g. makefile.mgw).

Which one to remove from makefile.all? Or another action to take?

---
PM

Re: What's left for a 4.2 release?

[Ethan A M. <merritt@u.washington.edu>]

On Friday 09 June 2006 02:32 pm, Hans-Bernhard Br=F6ker wrote:
>=20
> I for one am in the process of changing jobs and towns right now,=20
> implying no internet access for elongated periods, and not terribly much=
=20
> free time to spend on gnuplot.  I.e. unless we can find somebody else to=
=20
> actually do it, nothing will happen for at least about one more month.
>=20
> Any takers?

The rest of us do not know in detail what is required.
There are a few obvious things to start the process that should
not take so very much time:
 - create a new cvs branch containing the release candidate code base
 - modify VERSION, etc, to refer to itself correctly
 - some variant of `make cvs-dist` followed by placing the resulting
   tarball on the "files" page of SourceForge

The existence of a release candidate snapshot would already make
a lot of people happy.

There are a few more obvious things that everyone can help
with:
 - audit documentation to correctly describe what's new,
   what's changed, etc
 - run test builds on as many platforms as possible
   (I've already done 32+64 bit linux, alpha/DU4, irix, VMS)
 - update the web site description

Beyond that, I am really hazy on exactly what is required.
Could you give us a brief outline?  It's easier to get volunteers
if they know what they are volunteering for.

=2D-=20
Ethan A Merritt
Biomolecular Structure Center
University of Washington, Seattle 98195-7742

Re: What's left for a 4.2 release?

[Mojca M. <moj...@gm...>]

On 6/9/06, Ethan Merritt wrote:
> There are two contributions of preliminary new drivers:
>    #1398474       a driver for GD.pm
>    #1463191       First port.trm
> And Email but no actual patchsets from Mojca Miklavec
> <moj...@gm...> requesting inclusion of
> another TeX variant.  I have seen no discussion or feedback
> on any of these, so I have no idea how well they work or if
> they are worth polishing for inclusion in CVS.

I submitted it to patches if anyone is willing to test it.

But most polishing (missing functionality and direct inclusion of
graphs into documents) has to be done outside of gnuplot anyway. The
.trm is almost ready except for some missing functionality (images &
palettes; setting HCHAR/VCHAR according to font size, setting size og
the graphic; much efficiency could be gained by splitting text from
graphics). Processing the files is extremely inefficient in comparison
to other terminals (such as PostScript), but by separating text from
graphics and/or when the new pdfluatex will be out, that will be
improved considerably.

Mojca

Re: What's left for a 4.2 release?

[<tim...@en...>]

Hans-Bernhard Br=F6ker wrote:
> Ethan Merritt wrote:
>
> [... an excellent summary...]
>
> Well, guys, I'm afraid you may have missed the single most important=20
> ingredient: somebody who has the time and nerve to actually process the=
=20
> release.
>
> I for one am in the process of changing jobs and towns right now,=20
> implying no internet access for elongated periods, and not terribly muc=
h=20
> free time to spend on gnuplot.  I.e. unless we can find somebody else t=
o=20
> actually do it, nothing will happen for at least about one more month.
>
> Any takers?
Let's share the work as much as possible then. Last time we talked about=20
a release on this list (in last september), the idea was :

    - work on the patches/feature requests that are worth it for 4.2,=20
are then declare the feature freeze, and sort/solve reported bugs
       =3D> I think Ethan is taking care of that with his summary, we can=
=20
help by testing (the external X window patch for example)

    - make a development snapshot

Hans-Bernhard, can you make a list of other things that has to be done=20
for a release ? You seem to mean that a lot of work is necessary. What=20
do you mean ? Appropriate building of binary snapshots ? Review of=20
README and other text files ?

Timoth=E9e

Re: postscript terminal bug?

[Ethan M. <merritt@u.washington.edu>]

On Friday 09 June 2006 12:36 pm, Daniel J Sebald wrote:
>
> Here's the problem.  I'm paging through the output of 'pm3d.dem', call 
> it 'pm3d.ps', for the postscript terminal.  If I linearly step from 
> page 1 through page 41 the palette is correct.  However, if I jump
> about, the palette is not correct.

Got it.  OK, so the optimization cannot work for PostScript.
We'll have to revert the special-case PostScript code.

The bug in gsave/grestore that this code reveals may still be there,
but it probably won't bite anyone.  The mismatch is revealed because
the gsave is triggered by code that was made conditional, whereas the
corresponding grestore (wherever it is) is unconditional.

> What does PDF do?

PostScript is the odd man out because post.trm is the only driver
that pushes the task of assigning palette colors into the output
file itself.  For all other terminals, including PDF, the
core code keeps track of what colors to use in rendering
the current plot. 


-- 
Ethan A Merritt
Biomolecular Structure Center
University of Washington, Seattle WA

Re: What's left for a 4.2 release?

[<br...@ph...>]

Ethan Merritt wrote:

[... an excellent summary...]

Well, guys, I'm afraid you may have missed the single most important 
ingredient: somebody who has the time and nerve to actually process the 
release.

I for one am in the process of changing jobs and towns right now, 
implying no internet access for elongated periods, and not terribly much 
free time to spend on gnuplot.  I.e. unless we can find somebody else to 
actually do it, nothing will happen for at least about one more month.

Any takers?