Re: Cairo-PNG

[<tim...@en...>]

>      The  wxt  terminal  looks  great,  by the way;

Thanks !

> Timothée Lecomte mentioned, however, back in 2005* that:
>
>      [The  wxt  terminal]  could also be reused to give
>      ps/psf/png/... outputs easily.
>
> Is anyone working on antialiased PNG output via Cairo/Pango?
>
> Best, Peter
>
>   * http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/cairo/2005-November/005647.html
>

Well, the pdf terminal is in the works, there's a patch on sourceforge
nearing completion.

As far as other formats are concerned:
- gnuplot already does svg and postscript very well, and I'm afraid using
cairo for this would generate more obfuscated code (however, if gradients
are ever used in gnuplot, it would prevent us from doing the work
ourselves).
- for bitmap formats, cairo only knows pixel buffers and PNG. So my first
concern is that we would need another library if we want to do anything
besides PNG. My second concern is that we already have gd that does the
work quite well to export in jpeg/gif/png apart from not doing
antialiasing.

At first, I had the idea to provide an 'export' feature from the wxt
terminal, using cairo code directly. However, now I feel that it's
dangerous to have two different paths to do the same thing (gnuplot as it
is now is a scripting language after all, not a GUI).

Best regards,

Timothée