Re: default: x11 or wxt?

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

On Friday 01 September 2006 03:43 am, Richard Henwood wrote:
> I installed wxt out of curiosity.
> These are my general, initial impressions and thoughts:

> I didn't work 'out of the box' for me - fonts are tiny.

I too had font problems. Upgrading the support libraries and installing
fontconfig made it work.  But a user guide to fonts would be a nice
addition to the documentation.  Unfortunately, I myself only definitively
understand fonts for PostScript and libgd.  The other terminal types I
struggle with just as much as the next guy.

> It is slower than x11, am I going to run into 'out of memory' problems as
> well?

Petr has been saying this also, but to me the response seems snappy
enough.  It may be slower than x11, but on my machines the difference
is not enough to matter.  It could again be a question partly of
newer support libraries, and of course how fast is the CPU it runs
on.

> WxWidgets + Cairo + Pango, that's more dependency to maintain.
> I think on balance I'll be using X11 because of my particular font problem,
> and wxt doesn't give anything unique.

Those were my initial concerns, back when Timothee Lecomte first 
introduced the wxt driver.  But once I had it up and working (one operating
system version later) it has become my default standard.  Particularly
because the fonts work so well (UTF-8 and other multibyte fonts
"just work", whereas the mechanism on x11 is quite cumbersome).

> Is wxt driven by the svg term?

The two terminals have nothing in common that I can think of,
other than my not understanding font support on either of therm :-) 

> Does gnuplot support alpha channel?

Up until now it only supports an alpha channel in the sense that
several terminal drivers (png jpeg gif) allow you to specify a
transparent background.

Adding additional support for transparency is high on my list
of post-4.2 projects.  You can see a demo of preliminary support
for transparent fill areas on
    http://skuld.bmsc.washington.edu/people/merritt/gnuplot/

So far I have it working fully for wxt, and partially for svg,
png, jpeg, and pdf.  I will need to tap other people's expertise 
in order to extend support to additional terminal types.

This isn't quite the same as general support for an alpha
channel, though it could probably be extended to include other
plot elements besides filled areas.  In particular it would seem
an obvious extension to the image and rgbimage plot styles.

-- 
Ethan A Merritt
Biomolecular Structure Center
University of Washington, Seattle 98195-7742