Re: grouping available terminals together

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

On 2/10/07, Ethan A Merritt wrote:
>
> The logical next step would be to create an actual gnuplot package
> for TeX so that the user would do \usepackage{gnuplot}

Sure, but there has to be a good reason first (ie. enough
functionality provided). Solely for the reason of defining the
thirteen points types, it's not worth the problems. (Keep in mind that
the only reasonble way of having the solution work out-of-the-box is
to have the package on CTAN, not shipped with gnuplot, since shipping
the file with gnuplot needs an extra "installation" first - and you
might end up with the same question that you once asked me: what if
one has older gnuplot and newer TeX distribution or newer gnuplot and
older TeX)

But I still support having a gnuplot.sty if one can think of enough
ideas to implement in that package,  so that it will be "worth the
problems".


There is already a package "gnuplottex". With it one can do

\begin{gnuplot}
plot sin(x)
\end{gnuplot}

and it will run gnuplot automatically (with terminal "latex") and
include the resulting file (one needs write18 enabled and gnuplot in
PATH). Also, TikZ has an interesting module which passes a function to
gnuplot and runs it, but only to get the values of the function back:
it draws the result on it's own then.


Perhaps extentions to gnuplottex might make sense, again, if one has
ideas what to do. The package is rather new.

Mojca