Re: Bug Report and Enhanced text question

[<br...@ph...>]

Bastian Maerkisch wrote:
> Ethan Merritt wrote:

>> I don't think this is true.  Could you give a specific example?
>> For instance, the postscript driver itself knows little about text
>> layout.  That information is not available until much later, when
>> the output file is run through a postscript interpreter (e.g. a 
>> PostScript printer, ghostscript). By then it is far to late
>> to feed any information back to the gnuplot core routines.

> I think that this is only true for postscript. win.trm and pm.trm both
> need to know where to write the next piece of text and therefore need
> to know the width of the text.

Some drivers need to know the width.  The fact that the drivers exists 
is proof that they can get at it.

Other drivers don't need it.  The fact that some drivers exist even 
though they can't get at this information proves they don't strictly 
need it.

> So for most terminals you really need a way to get feedback about the
> text layout size.

Counting and arguing about "most terminals" from a sample of just 4 of 
them  makes little sense.

 > Postscript is special since the decision about the exact positioning
> of enhanced text can (and must) be postponed to when the file is actually
> rendered.

It's not all that special.

The fact that GD needs that two-pass try-and-fixup technique to do right 
and centered horizontal justification is a flaw of GD, not something to 
base terminal API design on.