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

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

Ethan A Merritt wrote:
> 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.

This is pretty much where I stand on the matter as well.

Dan