Re: Arrow head filling patch, and "port.trm"

[Chris K <gnu...@li...>]

Ethan Merritt wrote:
> On Friday 31 March 2006 01:39 pm, Chris K wrote:
>> Pre-Announcing "port.trm" :

After reading the thread of the wxWidget terminal patch on sourceforge, I
realized I had the same sampling/anti-aliasing problem.  I now oversample and
this fixes the wobbly appearance of "plot [-10:10] x".  The text emitted now
uses doubles for the coordinates, reflecting the added precision.  The amount of
oversampling is the largest integer multiple of max(width,height) than keeps it
smaller than 2^15. That way (x*x+y*y) is still about 2^31 and nothing weird
should happen.

>>
>> The ability to write the commands as ascii text to a file descriptor port is why
>> it is called "port.trm".  The idea to for the parent process to read the
>> commands and render/process them.
> 
> It sounds like this is a substantial update to the existing "debug.trm".
> That's fine, but perhaps your new code should just replace the existing
> sadly out of date debug terminal rather than creating a new name.

Well, the debugging term has a lot of sanity checking chatter on the output
which I don't want.  I think if I were debugging with the debug term I would be
adding all kinds of printf(stderr,...) statements to investigate, which would
break the text protocol that "port.trm" implicitly defines.

> 
>> So the new "port.trm" device uses fprintf to send a legible
>> ascii description of the rendering commands to either the output file or to an
>> integer file descriptor passed as a terminal option.
> 
> Ugh. Forget it.  No way.

Okay.  Consider it forgotten.

> Just set the output file to wherever you want the output to go.
>  

If you don't set the file descriptor than it does send it to gpoutfile like you
prefer.  And I can kludge the same effect for any terminal with:

set out "/dev/fd/5"

or, assuming bash:

set out "| cat >&5"

The only thing I worry about is if gnuplot closes the file descriptor and breaks
the connection.

>> When it is a bit more polished, I will post a copy of "port.trm" to sourceforge.
> 
> That's fine. It sounds like a worthwhile update to the set
> of terminal capabilities.
>