Re: Interactive terminals : behaviour on window resizing

[<tim...@en...>]

>> I would like to discuss what is the expected behaviour of the
>> interactive
>> terminals when the user resizes the windows.
>
>> I am now asking what is the best behaviour in these situations. The
>> purpose of gnuplot is to make the layout automatically, and to make it
>> good. So, to my mind, rescaling everything except the fontsize is kind
>> of
>> strange, as it gives overlapping.
>
> I am afraid that most terminal types do not have enough information
> about fonts to re-scale on their own.
> And what if the font isn't scalable?

So let's narrow the discussion to the wxt terminal which know how to
rescale fonts thanks to pango (however I don't know how it copes with
non-scalable fonts... are they absolutely non-scalable ? ).

>
>> I can imagine two other possibilites for the plot behavior when the us=
er
>> changes the window's size :
>>
>>   1) really scale everything - including the font size
>
> This would be very odd in x11.  I cannot think of a single x11 applicat=
ion
> in which the font size changes as you resize the window.  Generally you
> pick a readable font size, and that's the size you get no matter how bi=
g
> or small the window is.

That's a good point.
But notice that, apart from the gnuplot, I can't even think of any X11
application which scale anything when the user resizes the window. Image
viewers (gv, gimp...), web browsers (firefox...), pdf viewers (kpdf,
acrobat reader...), etc. usually don't rescale anything, but behave like
the point 2 that I describe below.

>
>>   2) don't scale anything and just display the plot centered in the
>> window
>> if it is smaller than the window, and if it is bigger add scrollbars o=
n
>> the edges of the window.
>
> Why would you ever want that?

Because it seems more consistent than rescaling and thus losing the
initial well-calculated layout, and because it is the usual behaviour of
other applications as explained above.

>
>> Thanks for your insight on this topic.
>
> One change that has been suggested for x11 is to honor the
> "set ratio" command; scaling up or down as the window size changes, but
> always keeping the requested aspect ratio.

This is a very interesting option. However remains the question of the
font scaling.

Thank you for your comments.

Timoth=E9e Lecomte