Re: grouping available terminals together

[Daniel J S. <dan...@ie...>]

Mojca Miklavec wrote:

> 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.

TeX is an old language, coinciding with some of the beginnings of computer software--the days when memory was small and programming languages were nascent.  Hence the advent of LaTeX macros.  I believe D. Knuth decided to freeze the language much to the chagrin of those who would want to add some improvements.

Think of TeX like an assembly language, whereas LaTeX is a compiler.

MetaPost gives better graphics, but it seems a small step above actual PostScript because everything needs to be spelled out.

With Xfig or some similar graphics drawing program, like McDraw (am I revealing my age?), you can generate EPS files via mouse.  Xfig, like gnuplot, allows a special flag so it too can create combined PostScript/LaTeX files.

Dan