Fwd: pslatex terminal output--Problem identified.

[Dmitri A. S. <das...@gm...>]

FYI
From the octave list:

Sincerely,

Dmitri.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: John W. Eaton <jw...@be...>
Date: Sep 21, 2005 8:24 PM
Subject: Re: pslatex terminal output--Problem identified.
To: Pete Gustafson <wat...@ya...>
Cc: he...@oc...



OK, I think this might be a bug in gnuplot.  You can reproduce it with
the following commands (these are essentially the commands that Octave
is sending to gnuplot, but plotting a function instead of a data file
to simplify things a bit)):

  plot sin(x) title "line 1"
  set terminal push
  set term postscript eps enhanced color solid
  set output "foo.eps"
  replot
  set terminal pop
  set output
  replot
  set term pslatex
  set output "foo.tex"
  replot
  quit

I have not looked at the code, so I am only guessing here, but it
seems that the problem might be that gnuplot is hanging on to some
postscript terminal options even after the set terminal pop statement
is executed.  If you insert something like

  set term postscript landscape

just after the set terminal pop statement, the problem goes away.  But
how can Octave know that it should do that?  It seems it would be
better for "set term pop" to restore the state of the terminal driver
to whatever it was when "set term push" was executed.

Here is a simpler example.  Compare foo.eps vs. foo.ps from the
following two scripts.

1:
  plot sin(x) title "line 1"
  set terminal push
  set term postscript
  set output "foo.ps"
  replot
  set terminal pop
  set output
  replot
  set term postscript eps enhanced color solid
  set output "foo.eps"
  replot
  quit

2:
  plot sin(x) title "line 1"
  set terminal push
  set term postscript eps enhanced color solid
  set output "foo.eps"
  replot
  set terminal pop
  set output
  replot
  set term postscript
  set output "foo.ps"
  replot
  quit

Looking at these I would expect foo.ps in both cases to be the simple
full page postscript plot.  But in the second case, both plots are
small eps style plots.

I just checked the latest CVS gnuplot and it seems the behavior is the
same.  Would someone like to report this problem and find out if it is
intentional behavior or a bug?

Thanks,

jwe



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