Re: Cairo-PNG

[Ethan M. <merritt@u.washington.edu>]

On Friday 09 March 2007 06:39, Peter Danenberg wrote:
>      Aye,  that's  the rub, Timoth=C3=A9e; I'm setting up gnuplot
> as a webservice, and having antialiased PNGs would be a sig=E2=80=90
> nificant quality-improvement.

There is also the choice of creating embedded SVG images for
web display.  I think this will be the wave of the future,
particularly if we add scripted mousing support to the SVG
output.  That way you'd have mousable plots on a web page.

Even aside from mousing, SVG has an advantage over PNG
in that it is vector-based and can be zoomed in the browser.

The current state of gnuplot SVG output is pretty good:

	http://gnuplot.sourceforge.net/demo_svg/

In fact, gnuplot's support of SVG is better than the
web browsers', which is where the biggest current problem lies.
By far the best browser support I've seen is in Konqueror,
which uses the ksvg module from KDE.  Firefox is not bad either,
although it doesn't handle transparency.
The Adobe browser plugin used to be pretty solid, but recently I
haven't been able to make it work at all under linux.

=2D-=20
Ethan A Merritt