grouping available terminals together

[Mojca M. <moj...@gm...>]

Hello,

I don't know how difficult it would be to add, but I would find it
very useful if terminals would be groupped when one says "set term" to
display the list of available terminals.

Example: four years ago, when I started to use gnuplot, I saw "latex"
and used that one. I used only a black-and-white printer and I had no
need for 3D plots, so it was OK to use it (I wasn't fully satisfied
with), but later at some point I figured out that I miss (better?)
suport for color, but I had no idea which terminal to choose.

There are in fact quite a lot of latex-based drivers: texdraw,
pstricks, eepic, tpic, [e]ps[la]tex, emtex (obsolete?), and perhaps
one could count mf and mp to the same category as well. (I wanted to
use TeX with equations and same font as in the document, but at that
time I didn't know that metapost ia a TeX's friend.) Altough
[e]ps[la]tex seems to be the only advanced driver nowadays, I didn't
notice its existance until I started to write a new terminal by
myself.

There are plenty of drivers whose name and description don't tell me
anything about it.

If a user is looking for a driver which would be suitable for a
publication, it probably makes no sense to offer him dozens of (mostly
obsolete?) printer drivers and interactive devices.

And for a linux or mac user, it would be helpul if [aqua,] x11 and wxt
(any other?) would be listed together as a hint that one can use wxt
as a replacement for x11 (if that one wouldn't be the default).

I would propose to change the behaviour of "set term" in such a way,
that something like the following list would be displayed:

Printer devices:
     epson_180dpi  Epson LQ-style 180-dot per inch (24 pin) printers
      epson_60dpi  Epson-style 60-dot per inch printers
      epson_lx800  Epson LX-800, Star NL-10, NX-1000, PROPRINTER ...
          hp2623A  HP2623A and maybe others
           hp2648  HP2648 and HP2647
           hp500c  HP DeskJet 500c, [75 100 150 300] [rle tiff]
             hpdj  HP DeskJet 500, [75 100 150 300]
             hpgl  HP7475 and relatives [number of pens] [eject]
           hpljii  HP Laserjet series II, [75 100 150 300]
             hppj  HP PaintJet and HP3630 [FNT5X9 FNT9X17 FNT13X25]
...

For specific programs:
             aifm  Adobe Illustrator 3.0 Format
              fig  FIG graphics language for XFIG graphics editor
...

TeX-friendly:
        emtex  LaTeX picture environment with emTeX specials
        latex  LaTeX picture environment
     epslatex  LaTeX picture environment using graphicx package
      pslatex  LaTeX picture environment with PostScript \specials
        pstex  plain TeX with PostScript \specials
        eepic  EEPIC -- extended LaTeX picture environment
         tpic  TPIC -- LaTeX picture environment with tpic \specials
     pstricks  LaTeX picture environment with PSTricks macros
      texdraw  LaTeX texdraw environment
           mf  Metafont plotting standard
           mp  MetaPost plotting standard
...

Vector graphics:
          pdf  PDF (Portable Document File) file driver
   postscript  PostScript graphics, including EPSF embedded files (*.eps)
          svg  W3C Scalable Vector Graphics driver
             aifm  Adobe Illustrator 3.0 Format
...

Bitmap graphics
             jpeg  JPEG images using libgd and TrueType fonts
          png  PNG images using libgd and TrueType fonts
...

Interactive:
             aqua  Interface to graphics terminal server for Mac OS X
              x11  X11 Window System
              wxt
...

Also, it might be helpful to add a little mark next next to terminals
to display their state. Some of them are actively maintained, some
will not be maintained any more, but might be still useful for some
users (probably tpic, eepic, and most printer devices), some cannot be
extended to support 3d palettes, but are simply "fun" (dumb  ascii art
for anything that prints text), some need improvements, but a
maintainer first (windows?), some are almost obsolete because there's
a better alternative (I consider at least metafont and emtex to be one
of them).

I've chosen just a few terminals in a pseudo-random way. I don't have
a clear overview, but consider the list above to be just an example
that I would consider very friendly to new users.

Mojca