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

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

Ethan A Merritt wrote:
> On Saturday 01 April 2006 02:22 pm, Chris K wrote:
>>> 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 sadly out of date debug terminal rather than creating a new name.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
> 
> Why not have both?

Everything takes time, that is why not both.

And I think the additional printf's could be put in debug.trm and achieve the
same or better effect.

Normally, debug.trm is compiled when DEBUG is defined, which turns on printf
code throughout gnuplot.

> Give your revised terminal an option 
> 	set term debug verbose
> to generate all the extra sanity checking output.
> 
If such checks get written, it will be done while I am actually debugging.

The *ideal* way to extend the protocol would be patching gnuplot to add semantic
information about each part of the output.  "X Axis Tics", "Line for second
plot", "key", "Y2 Grid lines", ...

That would still be easier than re-writing the parts of gnuplot that will be
used.  But this is a hobby, not a job.

Once I think I understand the protocol well enough, then I may be able to
implement a binary version.

A few interesting things that might be done easily from the recipient's side
(i.e. in haskell) based on the data, without calling gnuplot again:

Global changes:
* Rescale the plot, e.g. to match the window size.
* Crop and Zoom in.
* Arrange multiple plots.
* Re-render to a PNG file (that's how I made the image I linked to).
* Perhaps eventually re-render to future cairo backends (e.g. pdf)
Internal changes:
* Change the linetype or marker points appearances.
* Edit the text / nudge text position
* Pick out individual moveto(lineto+) lines and change their properties
separately.  But for this I may as well export to fig.trm
And by this time next year:
* Add a pony

-- 
Chris