Re: grouping available terminals together

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

On 2/9/07, Daniel J Sebald wrote:
> Mojca Miklavec wrote:
>
> > I mostly meant: nobody is maintaining the bunch of LaTeX terminals
> > which could indeed be improved considerably. If one wants to use
> > LaTeX, one expects quality.
> > Support for transparency or gouraud shading cannot be added to "dumb",
> > but ascii still has its own charm.
>
> Part of the reason that LaTeX only terminal types aren't maintained well is probably because one can never achieve the quality from strictly TeX as can be achieved with combining PostScript and LaTeX.  So, pslatex is the place to go if you need to compile equations, maintain a similar font, and have good graphics quality in LaTeX document.  Or ConTeXt.

I know. (La)TeX doesn't (or at least didn't) have good (native)
support for graphics, not even for such a basic thing as color. So I
can understand why dozens of terminals, out of which all but LaTeX and
[e]ps[la]latex are obsolete.

I was thinking about looking into TikZ. It works with a wide variety
of engines (so it would work with dvips/pdfTeX and XeTeX) and with all
three formats (TeX/LaTeX/ConTeXt). But I first need to have the
ConTeXt terminal under the roof (hoping that it will make it into the
official gnuplot one day), and I don't use TikZ at all, so it would
take me some time to learn it. Metapost is a nice programming
language, but TeX is the worst programming language I've ever tried to
use. And there is no such person as "Hans H." in the LaTeX community
to ask for help.

On the other hand, luaTeX might bring nice surprizes. There are
roumors that metapost might be integrated as a library into luaTeX.
(For those who hear that name for the first time: pdfTeX development
will most probably stop at version 1.40.x where it is now - luaTeX
will be it's successor.) If the roumors are true, current code for
ConTeXt might be adapted for LaTeX as well.

Mojca