Re: Fwd: [Gnuplot-developers] [ gnuplot-Bugs-1527701 ] -persist halts gnuplot, not exits

[Ethan A M. <merritt@u.washington.edu>]

On Thursday 27 July 2006 01:26 pm,  Timoth=E9e Lecomte wrote:
> Ethan Merritt wrote:
> > I suggest that wxt should work similarly.  When gnuplot sees that 'exit'
> > command, it should set a flag for wxt to see.  With the flag set, all
> > operations that require code outside the wxt driver itself should be
> > disabled.
> >  =20
> In the case of wxt, gnuplot is still there and the routines definitely=20
> available.
> On the other hand, disabling all operations that require core routines=20
> means disable all mouse routines. That would be sad.

But if you want to continue using gnuplot, why did you exit from it?

As I see it, the keyword "persist" means
"Keep the last plot on the screen even after gnuplot goes away".
There is no promise that you can continue to plot new things or
change the plot that is already there. Indeed there is no promise that
you can continue to read mouse coordinates either, although x11 does
allow that and wxt can certainly do the same.

Post-4.2 we can re-examine what additional operations are reasonable to
support while in this persistent state.  This is directly analogous to the
set of mousing operations it would be possible to support in an embedded
SVG plot. Since gnuplot itself is no longer around at the time of
interaction with the SVG document, all information for mouse interaction
must be embedded with it. =20

=46or example, I'd like to rework zooming so that it does not require
re-reading data from a file.  This would have a number of benefits:

1) It would be possible to zoom plots read from in-line data (plot '-').
   This would benefit all drivers.

2) It would (maybe) be possible to do at least simple zooming directly
   in gnuplot_x11 without involving calls back to gnuplot. SVG supports
   zooming natively, but exactly what that means for a gnuplot-generated
   plot I am not yet sure.

3) It would be possible to have zooming active for more than one plot,
   at least for x11 and svg.  Maybe wxt and pm as well.

	Ethan

=2D-=20
Ethan A Merritt
Biomolecular Structure Center
University of Washington, Seattle 98195-7742