Re: latex/pslatex terminals (was Re: grouping available terminals together)

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

On 2/13/07, Daniel J Sebald wrote:
> While on the topic if LaTeX related terminals, here's a few comments
>
> 2)  In the documentation are these examples:
>
>  Use gnuplot defaults (mostly sensible, but sometimes not really best):
>         set title '\LaTeX\ -- $ \gamma $'
>
> However, my experience is that to get a backslash into the LaTeX code requires \\, not just \.  So the above should probably be
>
>  Use gnuplot defaults (mostly sensible, but sometimes not really best):
>         set title '\\LaTeX\\ -- $ \\gamma $'

No, either
    set label '{\LaTeX\ -- $ \gamma $}' at 0,0
or
    set label "{\\LaTeX\\ -- $ \\gamma $}" at 0,0

Note the difference between single and double quote.

> Am I overlooking a backslash behavior switch somewhere?  The "most sensible, but sometimes not really best" comment above leaves one wondering "Why?".  Of course, there is always the possibility of defining ones own words outside gnuplot, like "\mytext1", "\eq1", that sort of thing.  But I'm not sure why the original author put that comment there.  (Not arguing against, just wondering what was meant.)

I'm not sure if I understood the question, but in LaTeX there's a big
problem, because alignment usually doesn't work properly. If you write
'\varepsilon^{2}', gnuplot will reserve 15 characters of space, but
you need less than two. The examples above show how to overcome this
problem.

> 3)  Is the
>
> font '<font>,#'
>
> terminal independent?  At least in terms of size.  I mean, it would be nice if there were a way of translating
>
> font ',16'
>
> so that the pslatex terminal places an approximate "\\large" in the text.  For example, say I want
>
> set title "Here is a title" font ",16"
>
> which creates a bigger title in x11, but not in pslatex.  If I do the following:
>
> set title "\\large Here is a title"
>
> then that "\\large " shows up in other terminals that aren't LaTeX.  Any objection if I write such a patch some day?  Or might there be a reason for a more broader use of the word "size".  We've got "pointsize", maybe "titlesize", "linesize".  Thoughts?

What would be the difference between "titlesize" and the size of the
font that you specify in the header?

Which font sizes are you planning to map to which LaTeX commands??? I
don't think that's good idea. In that case it might make more sense to
simply scale the title (if you assume that the font size is 10pt and
user asks for 16pt, you scale it to 160%). I bet there there are some
packages which allow you to specify font size explicitly, but fonts
have a high tendency to change (at least their names, if not the
format) and to become obsolete. Perhaps you don't notice that, but
just for example ... the euro symbol in ConTeXt is broken on TeXLive
this year, because the author has changed the font name and nobody
spotted that until it was too late.

In the ConTeXt terminal I pass the font string almost literally to
ConTeXt (I needed to add "pt" or some other explicit measure next to
font size - actually one of the ugliest part of the code). Saying
\switchtobodyfont[somename,16pt] works there, but I don't know about
LaTeX.

True, labels are not truly compatible between (La)TeX/ConTeXt and
other terminals, but they won't even be for some time and I would
expect the users to be aware of that:
- if you ever tried or will try to run some demos with the LaTeX
terminal, you'll see that appoximately half of the demo files will
fail because there is %, _, ^ or $ present in text labels.
- if someone decides to use LaTeX labels, he's probably also planning
to type {\bf ...}, $\alpha$, $\gamma$ or similar commands. And those
will fail with other terminals as well. I also use utf-8, which
doesn't work with ps.

Mojca