Current project about wxt

[<tim...@lp...>]

Dear gnuplot developpers,

I would like to inform you about my current projects related to gnuplot. 
Although I have been quite unproductive in terms of CVS commits for the 
last months, I am still thinking about implementing several things, and 
my interest in gnuplot has not vanished.

First, I still have in mind the gnuplot-with-wxt-on-MacOS issues. The 
radical solution is to use a separate process for the "wxt" terminal, as 
it is done for the "x11" terminal. I am currently working on this. It 
involves some work on IPC communication. I have chosen to use a "named 
pipe", which can be extended in the future to become a socket, if 
somebody is ever interested in network transparency at this level. I 
would like the gnuplot-wxt process to be pure GPL, so I won't borrow 
code from gplt_x11.c, but will write fresh lines. It's helping me to 
learn the issues of designing a IPC protocol... and once completed, it 
may be possible to replace some code in gplt_x11.c by the new one, if 
it's technically interesting. Part of the work involves killing the use 
of global variables in gp_cairo.c, such as the "enhanced text" variables 
or the global "term" pointer.

Second, linux distributions are likely to ship gnuplot without the wxt 
terminal, because they don't distribute wxWidgets libraries by default. 
So I plan to write a GTK terminal similar to "wxt", based on the same 
common roots of wxt, pngcairo and pdfcairo, namely the shared cairo and 
pango code.

Once those to items will be completed, I may work on some other ideas, 
such as a pdflatex terminal, or using flex+bison as a parser, or more 
several-terminals-at-a-time interactivity work, or 3D lightning and 
perspective, or whatever idea motivates me enough.

Best regards,

Timothée Lecomte