gnuplot-beta

Mac installation cloning

[Thomas M. <mat...@ph...>]

The main capability lacking from plain vanilla gnuplot built on my 10.6.8 Mac from source is the ability to make png or gif output.

What is the minimal set of packages I need to have to get png or gif terminal types?

I'd also like to be able to make pdf output.  What is the minimal set of packages to make pdf output?  

Or is there some way to trick the postscript terminal to make pdf output?  (I know that the postscript terminal can make eps output, which is not hard to convert to pdf.  And I know that if I install Aquaterm before the gnuplot build, then the "aqua" terminal type appears, and Aquaterm can save its window to a pdf file) 


It would be nice to make a Mac version of Gnuplot that supported all terminal types that are supported in the Windows version.

What terminal types are supported in the Windows version of gnuplot?

What packages are required so they could be available to a Mac version?





                                      Cheers

Prof. Thomas Mattison           Hennings 276
University of British Columbia  Dept. of Physics and Astronomy
6224 Agricultural Road          Vancouver  BC        V6T 1Z1  CANADA
mat...@ph...         phone: 604-822-9690  fax:604-822-5324

Re: Mac installation cloning

[Ethan A M. <sf...@us...>]

On Thursday, 03 March, 2016 16:22:32 Thomas Mattison wrote:
> The main capability lacking from plain vanilla gnuplot built on my 10.6.8 Mac from source is the ability to make png or gif output.
> 
> What is the minimal set of packages I need to have to get png or gif terminal types?

gif
===
gif is supported only by the gd terminal (libgd).
The only reason I know of that you would need this is so that you
can generate animated gifs directly from gnuplot.
It is possible to make animations from a series of png images, but
you would need to create the individual frames and then use an external
tool to stitch them together into an animation.

png
===
png images can be generated by the gd terminal (libgd), by the
cairo terminals, by wxt (via a "save as" button) and by qt
(also via a "save as" button).


> I'd also like to be able to make pdf output.  What is the minimal set of packages to make pdf output?  

Three choices:

qt:	if you have the qt support libraries, then you can create pdf output
	via a "save as" button from the qt terminal.  I personally think the
	qt terminal is the best interactive option that gnuplot supports, so
	I'd go with this if you can find the support libraries.

cairo:	"set term pdf" will default to the cairo terminal if you have it.
	The downside here is that it requires at least the cairo, pango, 
	pangocairo, and lgobject libraries, and you may or may not be able 
	to use copies built by someone else. 

TeX: The tikz terminal produces very nice pdf output, but it requires separate
	installation of lua and TeX/pdflatex.  On the gnuplot side the only extra
	library is liblua. As with Qt, this may be a good option if you can find
	a suitable ready-to-install TeX package.  Not practical to build from
	scratch however.

> Or is there some way to trick the postscript terminal to make pdf output? 

The plot part is trivial (same conversion as for *.eps files).
However a major reason for choosing pdf rather than postscript output is that 
postscript cannot handle UTF-8 text.  UTF-8 makes life so much easier for
math/greek/symbols, it would be a pity to limit your pdf output to things
that postscript can handle.

	Ethan

> (I know that the postscript terminal can make eps output, which is not hard to convert to pdf.  And I know that if I install Aquaterm before the gnuplot build, then the "aqua" terminal type appears, and Aquaterm can save its window to a pdf file) 
> 
> 
> It would be nice to make a Mac version of Gnuplot that supported all terminal types that are supported in the Windows version.
> 
> What terminal types are supported in the Windows version of gnuplot?
> What packages are required so they could be available to a Mac version?
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
>                                       Cheers
> 
> Prof. Thomas Mattison           Hennings 276
> University of British Columbia  Dept. of Physics and Astronomy
> 6224 Agricultural Road          Vancouver  BC        V6T 1Z1  CANADA
> mat...@ph...         phone: 604-822-9690  fax:604-822-5324

Re: Mac installation cloning

[<pl...@pi...>]

On 04/03/16 00:22, Thomas Mattison wrote:
> The main capability lacking from plain vanilla gnuplot built on my 10.6.8 Mac from source is the ability to make png or gif output.
>
> What is the minimal set of packages I need to have to get png or gif terminal types?
>
> I'd also like to be able to make pdf output.  What is the minimal set of packages to make pdf output?
>
> Or is there some way to trick the postscript terminal to make pdf output?  (I know that the postscript terminal can make eps output, which is not hard to convert to pdf.  And I know that if I install Aquaterm before the gnuplot build, then the "aqua" terminal type appears, and Aquaterm can save its window to a pdf file)
>
>
> It would be nice to make a Mac version of Gnuplot that supported all terminal types that are supported in the Windows version.
>
> What terminal types are supported in the Windows version of gnuplot?
>
> What packages are required so they could be available to a Mac version?
>
>
>
>
>
>                                        Cheers
>
> Prof. Thomas Mattison           Hennings 276
> University of British Columbia  Dept. of Physics and Astronomy
> 6224 Agricultural Road          Vancouver  BC        V6T 1Z1  CANADA
> mat...@ph...         phone: 604-822-9690  fax:604-822-5324
>
>

Run up a copy on windows and enter set term to see what terminals are 
available.

gnuplot> set term


The list will be long and you probably could cut a whole load and save 
yourself a lot of work.

I think using cairo and pango to supply png avoids the mess caused by 
png devs breaking binary compatibility between versions.

Peter.

Re: Mac installation cloning

[Jun T. <tak...@kb...>]

On 2016/03/04, at 9:22, Thomas Mattison <mat...@ph...> wrote:

> The main capability lacking from plain vanilla gnuplot built on my 10.6.8 Mac from source is the ability to make png or gif output.

Are you (or your students) going to create many (a series of) png
files? Then you will need "png" or "pngcairo" terminals, but either
of them requires several libraries. For example, "pngcairo" requires
lbpng and pango/cairo, pango requires glib, and cairo requires pixman.

If you will only occasionally create a few png files, then you can
use Aquaterm.app to save the plot in pdf file, and use Preview.app
to convert it to png (or jpeg, tiff, gif; you need to option-click
the format menu to enable gif in the save dialog).
Or you can type cmd-C in Aquaterm to copy the plot to the clipboard,
switch to Preview, and type cmd-N to create a new picture from
the clipboard. Then you can save it as png etc.

Building a "clonable" gnuplot with lots of terminals would be (very)
tedious, if not impossible. How about staring with just "aqua" terminal
and try it for some time to see whether it is enough for your students?

Aquaterm, however, has no mouse/keyboard support. For example, you can
not rotate the 3D plot (splot) by mouse. If this is not acceptable,
then you need either "qt" or "wxt" terminal.
"wxt" requires wxWidgets and pango/cairo and harder to build, but
once pango/cairo is installed then "pngcairo" can also use it.
"qt" terminal requires Qt, but Qt has a standard Mac installer
(all of your student must run the installer by themselves, but the
same applies to the Aquaterm installer).