Re: Argh: Why are arrows clipped to the graph?

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

On Sunday 13 November 2005 12:57 pm, Harald Harders wrote:
> What about the formats pnm, pbm? They are the most basic file formats I
> know, and they are portable (I believe  pbm stands for portable bitmap).
> Many programmes can produce pnm and pbm.

It's a matter of taste.   The "unix way" is to string together separate
modular tools rather than bloating every application with redundant code
to perform the same job as existing tools.  It seems to me a bad idea to
turn gnuplot into a bitmapped image processing tool when there are many 
such tools already that gnuplot can pipe through.

It is true, as Petr points out, that gnuplot already links to at least
one library (libgd) that can read in png, gif and jpeg files.  But that
doesn't handle pnm, or eps, or any of the 3 dozen or so formats that 
ImageMagick can handle.  Why add special code that only handles a few
cases, when it is actually less work to add a single interface to a
general tool that handles all cases?

And if you really don't like piping for some reason, the ImageMagick
routines are available as a shared library libMagick.so.

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