Re: Consistent naming scheme for cairo-based terminals

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

On Tuesday 02 October 2007 17:08, Allin Cottrell wrote:
> On Sun, 30 Sep 2007, Petr Mikulik wrote:
> 
> > > So I propose that we rename the two cairo based terminals, and any future 
> > > ones, to use instead the names
> > > 	set term pdfcairo
> > > 	set term pngcairo
> > 
> > I like this naming as well.
> 
> Hmm.  Given the pace of gnuplot development at present (in itself, 
> very good) it seems that quite a few people are using CVS gnuplot.
> So backward-incompatible changes (even just backward-incompatible 
> with prior CVS) seems to me better avoided, if possible.

The cairo+png terminal isn't even in CVS yet.
The cairo+pdf terminal just went in a month or so back, and is
not yet production-ready.  It's easy enough to make "cairopdf"
recognized as a synonym if necessary.

> Is it the case that having multiple drivers for a given target 
> format (PDF, PNG) is a temporary, transitional phenomenon?  

I don't know.  

You are correct that it is a nuisance. For the last 4 years there
have been two PNG drivers, mostly because for unknown reasons various
linux distributions didn't switch over to the libgd-based driver even
though the distro itself ships libgd.  I hope we've quashed that for
4.2 by deleting the older driver from the tree.


But the choice of pdf drivers is a somewhat different story.
At the moment the pdflib-based terminal is more capable, but it isn't
all that widespread because the licensing restrictions prevent its
being bundled into pre-built binaries.
For now I think people who build their own may want to stick with
pdflib, while the bundlers would happily include the cairo version
in order to provide pdf output even if it is imperfect.
And then there are the developers, who may want both drivers 
available in the same build in order to compare their output.

> I would rather hope so.  But in that case, do we really want to do 
> what Ethan is suggesting?  In other words, it seems a bad 
> precedent to have "terminals" named "<format><altdriver>".

I'm open to other suggestions. But this one has the virtue that
you would only have to type "set term pdf" even if the full name
is "set term pdfcairo".  So your scripts would work no matter 
which of the pdf terminals was present, subject of course to any
limitations in what features are supported.

-- 
Ethan A Merritt