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From: Petr M. <mi...@ph...> - 2006-08-31 07:53:38
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What will be the default terminal for 4.2 under X11 -- x11 or wxt? Currently
it is wxt. However, its performance for drawing images is lower than x11.
Should not be x11 the default?
What about printing the following message on gnuplot startup:
Send bug reports and suggestions to <gnu...@li...>
Interactive terminals: x11, wxt
Interactive terminals: pm, x11
Interactive terminals: windows
---
PM
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From: Ethan A M. <merritt@u.washington.edu> - 2006-08-31 15:16:19
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On Thursday 31 August 2006 12:53 am, Petr Mikulik wrote: > What will be the default terminal for 4.2 under X11 -- x11 or wxt? > Currently it is wxt. It is only the default if all the supporting libraries are found. People who have all the pango + cairo + wxgtl libraries may reasonably be assumed to want to take advantage of them. If not, then they can set GNUTERM to x11. > However, its performance for drawing images is lower than x11. > Should not be x11 the default? I personally find wxt to be preferable to x11. The anti-aliasing makes the plots easier to read, the font support is far more usable (UTF-8 works with no special hacks, unlike x11), and the user interface will I hope become extensible. The only thing I don't like about it is the strange behavior when you resize the plot window. But I admit that I do not use gnuplot for drawing images, so if the performance at that specific task is not good then I can understand why your preference might depend on your typical usage. Is the problem rendering speed, or something else? If it is only a matter of speed, then maybe it can be further optimized. > What about printing the following message on gnuplot startup: > > Send bug reports and suggestions to <gnu...@li...> > Interactive terminals: x11, wxt > Interactive terminals: pm, x11 > Interactive terminals: windows I assume you mean to print only one of those lines on any given setup. But why would anyone want to see that every time? -- Ethan A Merritt Biomolecular Structure Center University of Washington, Seattle 98195-7742 |
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From: Petr M. <mi...@ph...> - 2006-08-31 15:48:11
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>> What will be the default terminal for 4.2 under X11 -- x11 or wxt? >> Currently it is wxt. > > It is only the default if all the supporting libraries are found. > People who have all the pango + cairo + wxgtl libraries may reasonably > be assumed to want to take advantage of them. Yes, it will be compiled automatically. So, for modern linux distributions, gnuplot will depend on more packages then until now. Or some "optimized" distributions could even distribute both gnuplot/X11 and gnuplot/X11+WX. > If not, then they can set GNUTERM to x11. it is easier to modify $HOME/.gnuplot >> However, its performance for drawing images is lower than x11. >> Should not be x11 the default? > > I personally find wxt to be preferable to x11. > The anti-aliasing makes the plots easier to read, Yes, wxt has nicer drawings. > But I admit that I do not use gnuplot for drawing images, > so if the performance at that specific task is not good > then I can understand why your preference might depend on > your typical usage. I just try to measure it (averaged over 10 times of plot 'out.gpbin' binary with image): # Results: 512^2 image: x11 takes 0.25 second, wxt 0.5 seconds # Results: 1024^2 image: x11 takes 0.8 second, wxt 1.4 seconds # Results: 2048^2 image: x11 takes 3.2 second, wxt 5.0 seconds (I use it for images mainly under Octave.) > If it is only a matter of speed, then maybe it can be > further optimized. I think Timothee said that's the speed of pango which will be optimized later on. >> What about printing the following message on gnuplot startup: >> >> Send bug reports and suggestions to <gnu...@li...> >> Interactive terminals: x11, wxt >> Interactive terminals: pm, x11 >> Interactive terminals: windows > > I assume you mean to print only one of those lines on any given setup. yes > But why would anyone want to see that every time? Because he can choose? --- PM |
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From: <br...@ph...> - 2006-09-01 00:43:09
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Petr Mikulik wrote: > What about printing the following message on gnuplot startup: > > Send bug reports and suggestions to <gnu...@li...> That would be the wrong message for a release binary. Discussion of released versions is supposed to happen in the USENET newsgroup and on the gnuplot-info list. gnuplot-beta is for developers (and those users who want to help us). |
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From: Richard H. <r.h...@rl...> - 2006-09-01 10:44:34
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Petr Mikulik wrote: > What will be the default terminal for 4.2 under X11 -- x11 or wxt? > Currently it is wxt. However, its performance for drawing images is lower > than x11. Should not be x11 the default? > I use x11 terminal for quick looks, and epslatex for hardcopy/publication. I installed wxt out of curiosity. These are my general, initial impressions and thoughts: wxt looks good on the screen. It provides and mechanism to implement richer functionality (save as 'eps/png/svg/etc..' option?) in future. however, I didn't work 'out of the box' for me - fonts are tiny. It is slower than x11, am I going to run into 'out of memory' problems as well? WxWidgets + Cairo + Pango, that's more dependency to maintain. I think on balance I'll be using X11 because of my particular font problem, and wxt doesn't give anything unique. I would probably want wxt default if alpha channel existed and unsupported in x11. These thoughts have raised a couple of questions I am curious about: Does gnuplot support alpha channel? Is wxt driven by the svg term? r, |
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From: Ethan A M. <merritt@u.washington.edu> - 2006-09-02 22:11:17
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On Friday 01 September 2006 03:43 am, Richard Henwood wrote:
> I installed wxt out of curiosity.
> These are my general, initial impressions and thoughts:
> I didn't work 'out of the box' for me - fonts are tiny.
I too had font problems. Upgrading the support libraries and installing
fontconfig made it work. But a user guide to fonts would be a nice
addition to the documentation. Unfortunately, I myself only definitively
understand fonts for PostScript and libgd. The other terminal types I
struggle with just as much as the next guy.
> It is slower than x11, am I going to run into 'out of memory' problems as
> well?
Petr has been saying this also, but to me the response seems snappy
enough. It may be slower than x11, but on my machines the difference
is not enough to matter. It could again be a question partly of
newer support libraries, and of course how fast is the CPU it runs
on.
> WxWidgets + Cairo + Pango, that's more dependency to maintain.
> I think on balance I'll be using X11 because of my particular font problem,
> and wxt doesn't give anything unique.
Those were my initial concerns, back when Timothee Lecomte first
introduced the wxt driver. But once I had it up and working (one operating
system version later) it has become my default standard. Particularly
because the fonts work so well (UTF-8 and other multibyte fonts
"just work", whereas the mechanism on x11 is quite cumbersome).
> Is wxt driven by the svg term?
The two terminals have nothing in common that I can think of,
other than my not understanding font support on either of therm :-)
> Does gnuplot support alpha channel?
Up until now it only supports an alpha channel in the sense that
several terminal drivers (png jpeg gif) allow you to specify a
transparent background.
Adding additional support for transparency is high on my list
of post-4.2 projects. You can see a demo of preliminary support
for transparent fill areas on
http://skuld.bmsc.washington.edu/people/merritt/gnuplot/
So far I have it working fully for wxt, and partially for svg,
png, jpeg, and pdf. I will need to tap other people's expertise
in order to extend support to additional terminal types.
This isn't quite the same as general support for an alpha
channel, though it could probably be extended to include other
plot elements besides filled areas. In particular it would seem
an obvious extension to the image and rgbimage plot styles.
--
Ethan A Merritt
Biomolecular Structure Center
University of Washington, Seattle 98195-7742
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From: <tim...@en...> - 2006-09-04 13:20:40
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> On Friday 01 September 2006 03:43 am, Richard Henwood wrote: >> I installed wxt out of curiosity. >> These are my general, initial impressions and thoughts: > >> I didn't work 'out of the box' for me - fonts are tiny. > > I too had font problems. Upgrading the support libraries and installing > fontconfig made it work. But a user guide to fonts would be a nice > addition to the documentation. Unfortunately, I myself only definitive= ly > understand fonts for PostScript and libgd. The other terminal types I > struggle with just as much as the next guy. Fonts handling in general is very complicated because it eventually has t= o handle many aspects of the problem, and it's not always about "finding th= e font file" unfortunately. Fontconfig is a tool to manage the fonts that are installed on your unix system. If fontconfig does not know about any font, most graphic apps including those based on gtk and qt won't work correctly or will choose some ugly default font. Pango is a higher level library that takes care of languages, fonts aspects, characters coverage, and redering. It looks in the fonts registered in fontconfig to find the one that is best suited to the chain of utf8 characters that it has to render. This font is the one that contains most of the characters of the given string (that's the "characte= r coverage" of the font) and that respects the style that the user asked fo= r (bold, oblique, sans, serif, or more strict requirements such as the font name directly). To the end user, there is very little to do on a recent distribution, since pango and fontconfig have been used for years now. Of course, in Richard's case, there must be a bug in the way I coded it for the wxt terminal. I agree that a general fonts user guide would be nice. >> It is slower than x11, am I going to run into 'out of memory' problems= as >> as well? > > Petr has been saying this also, but to me the response seems snappy > enough. It may be slower than x11, but on my machines the difference > is not enough to matter. It could again be a question partly of > newer support libraries, and of course how fast is the CPU it runs > on. Richard, you're not going to run out-of-memory, nor will your computer explode ! The wxt terminal provides anti-aliasing, and that's its unique feature. Only The aqua terminal for mac is the only other terminal to provide it too. For those of you who have not tried its refreshed gnuplot taste yet, here is a recycled screenshot (wxt on top, x11 on bottom): http://tipote.free.fr/wxt19.png Currently (and I should stress on "currently"), this better visual rendering comes with a little slow-down compared to the x11 terminal. But cairo (the underlying graphic library) is a fast-improving pease of software, and you would be amazed to read the mailing list and see how good is the work done on it, and how cooperative its development is. For example, these days were proposed improvements from the leading developpe= r of the FreeType project (font antialiasing). X and mozilla developpers ar= e involved too, . The algorithms currently used by cairo are known to be suboptimal, and the wxt terminal uses the all-software rendering path. In the future, we will profit from optimization in cairo as well as hardware accelerated rendering, providing the state-of-the-art performance for gnuplot at a low price since cairo and its friend libraries will do the hard work for us. In the mean time, if you want to keep x11 the default on top of wxt, it's not a problem for me. However, in my opinion, the first use of gnuplot fo= r new users is mostly drawing 2D curves, and the wxt terminal does that muc= h nicer than the X11 terminal, and for no noticeable slowness. When it come= s to dense 3D plots or images, I agree that wxt is noticeably slower. I can add a message in the wxt help, explaining that "native" terminals (win an= d x11) can be used instead if performance is an issue. >> Does gnuplot support alpha channel? > > Up until now it only supports an alpha channel in the sense that > several terminal drivers (png jpeg gif) allow you to specify a > transparent background. > > Adding additional support for transparency is high on my list > of post-4.2 projects. You can see a demo of preliminary support > for transparent fill areas on > http://skuld.bmsc.washington.edu/people/merritt/gnuplot/ > > So far I have it working fully for wxt, and partially for svg, > png, jpeg, and pdf. I will need to tap other people's expertise > in order to extend support to additional terminal types. Ethan, that's a very nice and valuable work ! Best regards, Timoth=E9e |
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From: Petr M. <mi...@ph...> - 2006-09-05 11:28:59
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On SUSE 10.0, I can see the following problem with wxt: the mouse cursor is white. Thus you don't see the pointer on white graph background. We tried to debug it with Timothee some time ago, and it turned out to be due to a combination of the wx (2.6.1) et al libraries, which is obviously fixed in newer wx. Does somebody else see this problem? Would it be helpful if wxterminal supports -background command line option? Or the config dialog could have an option to change the background color. BTW, in the wxt "config" dialog, I propose to write "(-persist)" instead of "(persist)", etc. --- PM |
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From: <tim...@en...> - 2006-09-05 11:48:44
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> On SUSE 10.0, I can see the following problem with wxt: the mouse curso= r > is > white. Thus you don't see the pointer on white graph background. We tri= ed > to > debug it with Timothee some time ago, and it turned out to be due to a > combination of the wx (2.6.1) et al libraries, which is obviously fixed= in > newer wx. Does somebody else see this problem? Strange problem, indeed. It would help to have other reports. > Would it be helpful if wxterminal supports -background command line > option? > Or the config dialog could have an option to change the background colo= r. I thought the new rectangle feature by Ethan could provide that without anything special in the terminal, as it is done in the demos: set style rectangle back fc lt -3 fillstyle solid 1.00 border -1 Am I right ? > > BTW, in the wxt "config" dialog, I propose to write "(-persist)" instea= d > of > "(persist)", etc. I guess you are thinking of the command line option. Please note that you can also use 'set term wxt persist', so the '-' would be misleading in that case. Best regards, Timoth=E9e > > --- > PM |
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From: Daniel J S. <dan...@ie...> - 2006-09-05 14:17:43
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Timoth=E9e Lecomte wrote:
>>BTW, in the wxt "config" dialog, I propose to write "(-persist)" instea=
d
>>of
>>"(persist)", etc.
>=20
>=20
> I guess you are thinking of the command line option. Please note that y=
ou
> can also use 'set term wxt persist', so the '-' would be misleading in
> that case.
>=20
> Best regards,
>=20
> Timoth=E9e
If you are talking command line options and multiple terminal types for l=
inux/unix, I just want to note there is this in plot.c.
} else if (!strcmp(argv[i], "-h") || !strcmp(argv[i], "--help")) {
printf( "Usage: gnuplot [OPTION]... [FILE]\n"
#ifdef X11
"for X11 options see 'help X11->command-line-options'\n"
#endif
" -V, --version\n"
" -h, --help\n"
which is probably good if gnuplot is set up to have just wxt and not x11.=
But if there are both wxt and x11 present in the same build, and there =
is to be wxt options, then listing the wxt options as well may be the log=
ical choice.
Dan
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From: <tim...@en...> - 2006-09-04 13:22:00
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> On Friday 01 September 2006 03:43 am, Richard Henwood wrote: >> I installed wxt out of curiosity. >> These are my general, initial impressions and thoughts: > >> I didn't work 'out of the box' for me - fonts are tiny. > > I too had font problems. Upgrading the support libraries and installing > fontconfig made it work. But a user guide to fonts would be a nice > addition to the documentation. Unfortunately, I myself only definitive= ly > understand fonts for PostScript and libgd. The other terminal types I > struggle with just as much as the next guy. Fonts handling in general is very complicated because it eventually has t= o handle many aspects of the problem, and it's not always about "finding th= e font file" unfortunately. Fontconfig is a tool to manage the fonts that are installed on your unix system. If fontconfig does not know about any font, most graphic apps including those based on gtk and qt won't work correctly or will choose some ugly default font. Pango is a higher level library that takes care of languages, fonts aspects, characters coverage, and redering. It looks in the fonts registered in fontconfig to find the one that is best suited to the chain of utf8 characters that it has to render. This font is the one that contains most of the characters of the given string (that's the "characte= r coverage" of the font) and that respects the style that the user asked fo= r (bold, oblique, sans, serif, or more strict requirements such as the font name directly). To the end user, there is very little to do on a recent distribution, since pango and fontconfig have been used for years now. Of course, in Richard's case, there must be a bug in the way I coded it for the wxt terminal. I agree that a general fonts user guide would be nice. >> It is slower than x11, am I going to run into 'out of memory' problems= as >> as well? > > Petr has been saying this also, but to me the response seems snappy > enough. It may be slower than x11, but on my machines the difference > is not enough to matter. It could again be a question partly of > newer support libraries, and of course how fast is the CPU it runs > on. Richard, you're not going to run out-of-memory, nor will your computer explode ! The wxt terminal provides anti-aliasing, and that's its unique feature. Only The aqua terminal for mac is the only other terminal to provide it too. For those of you who have not tried its refreshed gnuplot taste yet, here is a recycled screenshot (wxt on top, x11 on bottom): http://tipote.free.fr/wxt19.png Currently (and I should stress on "currently"), this better visual rendering comes with a little slow-down compared to the x11 terminal. But cairo (the underlying graphic library) is a fast-improving pease of software, and you would be amazed to read the mailing list and see how good is the work done on it, and how cooperative its development is. For example, these days were proposed improvements from the leading developpe= r of the FreeType project (font antialiasing). X and mozilla developpers ar= e involved too. The algorithms currently used by cairo are known to be suboptimal, and the wxt terminal uses the all-software rendering path. In the future, we will profit from optimization in cairo as well as hardware accelerated rendering, providing the state-of-the-art performance for gnuplot at a low price since cairo and its friend libraries will do the hard work for us. In the mean time, if you want to keep x11 the default on top of wxt, it's not a problem for me. However, in my opinion, the first use of gnuplot fo= r new users is mostly drawing 2D curves, and the wxt terminal does that muc= h nicer than the X11 terminal, and for no noticeable slowness. When it come= s to dense 3D plots or images, I agree that wxt is noticeably slower. If yo= u will, I can add a message in the wxt help, explaining that "native" terminals (win and x11) can be used instead if performance is an issue. >> Does gnuplot support alpha channel? > > Up until now it only supports an alpha channel in the sense that > several terminal drivers (png jpeg gif) allow you to specify a > transparent background. > > Adding additional support for transparency is high on my list > of post-4.2 projects. You can see a demo of preliminary support > for transparent fill areas on > http://skuld.bmsc.washington.edu/people/merritt/gnuplot/ > > So far I have it working fully for wxt, and partially for svg, > png, jpeg, and pdf. I will need to tap other people's expertise > in order to extend support to additional terminal types. Ethan, that's a very nice and valuable work ! Best regards, Timoth=E9e |
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From: Richard H. <r.h...@rl...> - 2006-09-05 12:52:55
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Timothée Lecomte wrote: >> On SUSE 10.0, I can see the following problem with wxt: the mouse cursor >> is >> white. Thus you don't see the pointer on white graph background. We tried >> to >> debug it with Timothee some time ago, and it turned out to be due to a >> combination of the wx (2.6.1) et al libraries, which is obviously fixed >> in newer wx. Does somebody else see this problem? > > Strange problem, indeed. It would help to have other reports. > I haven't had this problem on my setup, the cursor appears as a small black cross over the graph. wx version: 2.6.2.1-20 r, |
