Re: grouping available terminals together

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

On Thursday 08 February 2007 15:18, Mojca Miklavec wrote:

> 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.

Why stop with those?  I use LaTeX, but I don't use any of the above.
Instead I use either post, png or pdf to produce figures for my LaTeX
documents.  The category "can be used with TeX" is rather large.

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

Such as?  The only one I see on the "set term" list that comes with 
zero explanation is "Selanar".  But if you have a Selanar terminal then
you already know what it is, and if you don't have one then the driver
is useless to you anyhow.  Would it help any to say
  selanar  DEC vt100-series ascii terminal clone with add-in graphics
           capability, not sighted in the wild since 1992
  regis    DEC vt100-series graphics language (vt125, vt240, ...)


I do have some sympathy for re-organizing the list based on degree of
obsolescence:

Current generation interactive terminals
	wxt x11 aquaterm pm

Legacy interactive terminals
	aed *tek* regis selanar win

Current generation printer drivers
	NONE (use PostScript or wrap output in a document format)

Legacy printer drivers
	<all of them>

Legacy O/S-specific terminals (essentially obsolete; may not work)
	atari apollo be iris linux multitos next openstep sun vws

MSOffice-friendly
	cgm emf png/gif/jpeg

web-friendly
	png/gif/jpeg svg

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


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

Here is another example of how this quickly gets complicated.
The recommended terminal for Adobe Illustrator is currently post.trm
The fig terminal is also used (I was told just recently) for
import into AutoCAD.


> 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),

Hey! That's actually one of the more useful terminals.
It is maintained,and it even supports enhanced text mode.
I use it for including graphs in-line in Email, as an option for
web output, and for testing over remote low-bandwidth net connections.

> 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.

I have no objection.  The main hurdle is that the terminal list is
auto-generated by the build process, rather than being written out
explicitly in the doc files.  But the result from auto-generation
is not so great.  Its chief virtue is that it tells you what was
actually built into this copy of gnuplot.  Then again, people have
complained that it should also tell you what was *not* built in so
that you can go looking for a more full-featured build of gnuplot.

It would be a rather boring project, but I suppose someone could
invent a flag variable or grep-able tag in the terminal files that
listed the categories to which that terminal belongs. Then the 
auto-generation system could use the flag to arrange the terminal
listing into groups.  E.g.

iris4d.trm:
### grep-able comment for generating terminal documentation ### 
# TERM_CATAGORY  iris4d OS-SPECIFIC  OBSOLETE  VECTOR  INTERACTIVE


gd.trm:
# TERM_CATEGORY  png   WEB MSOFFICE BITMAP TEX 
# TERM_CATEGORY  jpeg  WEB MSOFFICE BITMAP 



-- 
Ethan A Merritt