Re: grouping available terminals together

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

On 2/12/07, Ethan Merritt wrote:
> On Monday 12 February 2007 12:39, Hans-Bernhard Br=F6ker wrote:
> > Ethan A Merritt wrote:
> >
> > > Back to the topic of allowing color in LaTeX plots.  It seems perfect=
ly
> > > reasonable to me.
> >
> > Unfortunately, Donald E. Knuth disagrees with that view.  TeX doesn't d=
o
> > colour, period.
>
> But LaTeX does, it seems.
> This is a LaTeX driver, right? not a TeX-with-nothing-else driver.
> I'm a LaTeX novice, and may be missing something obvious, but adding
> color "just works" for me here using teTeX.
>
> > Yes, some extensions of TeX using \special commands put into the DVI
> > output file, do; as do variants of TeX such as pdftex.  But those are
> > not TeX.
>
> Here is a simple test.tex file produced by gnuplot with color enabled
>
> % GNUPLOT: LaTeX picture
> \setlength{\unitlength}{0.240900pt}
> \ifx\plotpoint\undefined\newsavebox{\plotpoint}\fi
> \sbox{\plotpoint}{\rule[-0.200pt]{0.400pt}{0.400pt}}%
> \color[rgb]{0.00,0.00,0.00}
> \begin{picture}(1500,900)(0,0)
> \sbox{\plotpoint}{\rule[-0.200pt]{0.400pt}{0.400pt}}%
> \color[rgb]{0.00,0.00,0.00}
> \put(60.0,40.0){\rule[-0.200pt]{0.400pt}{177.543pt}}
> \put(60.0,40.0){\rule[-0.200pt]{337.019pt}{0.400pt}}
> \put(1459.0,40.0){\rule[-0.200pt]{0.400pt}{177.543pt}}
> \color[rgb]{0.00,0.00,1.00}
> \put(759,839){\makebox(0,0){TeX color test - title in blue, plot in red}}
> \put(60.0,777.0){\rule[-0.200pt]{337.019pt}{0.400pt}}
> \color[rgb]{1.00,0.00,0.00}
> \put(60,40){\makebox(0,0){$+$}}
> \put(526,286){\makebox(0,0){$+$}}
> \put(993,531){\makebox(0,0){$+$}}
> \put(1459,777){\makebox(0,0){$+$}}
> \color[rgb]{0.00,0.00,0.00}
> \put(60.0,40.0){\rule[-0.200pt]{0.400pt}{177.543pt}}
> \put(60.0,40.0){\rule[-0.200pt]{337.019pt}{0.400pt}}
> \put(1459.0,40.0){\rule[-0.200pt]{0.400pt}{177.543pt}}
> \put(60.0,777.0){\rule[-0.200pt]{337.019pt}{0.400pt}}
> \color[rgb]{0.00,0.00,0.00}
> \end{picture}
>
> And here is my test LaTeX document:
>   \documentclass{article}
>   \usepackage{color}
>   \begin{document}
>   \input{test}
>   \end{document}
>
> I see nothing marked \special
>
> > I'm pointing out that the whole reason for 'set term latex' to
> > exist, given the much more feature-rich alternatives available, is that
> > its output has a quality that none of the others can offer: it works
> > with *every* valid TeX implementation, no matter how old, no matter how
> > strange.  The price for this feature is that the capabilities are rathe=
r
> > severely limited.  If we break this feature, there'll be no point left
> > to use latex.trm instead of epslatex.trm.  In that case latex.trm would
> > have become pointless.
>
> It may well be that there is already no point in using latex.trm;
> that was my other question :-)
>
> Why this vehemence against color?  The same driver (latex.trm)
> already emits emtex specials if asked.  Those was *are* marked
> \special, and in fact I can't get the resulting file to do anything
> reasonable when fed to teTeX.  Why is that OK but not color?

The command \color itself uses special's on low-level. But I don't see
anything wrong with that.

I would suggest to add both color and rotatebox
1.) If users don't want it, they can still use the same old latex.trm
without color and rotatebox, so they can still get perfectly
compatible file.
2.) Color works well with any reasonable driver. (PS: use the first
color switching command inside \begin{picture}, otherwise it might
influence the text that follows the graphics (I might be wrong
though). Or, perhaps better, color each component separatly - that way
you can preserve a different background color.)

I'm ready to implement those two features, but I guess that you just
did that already.

Mojca]