Re: DPU-414 terminal

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

On Thursday 22 May 2008 13:30, Jonathan Thornburg wrote:
> On Thu, 22 May 2008, someone whose nested quoting has overflowed
> my mental stack :) wrote:
> > The bitmap terminals are pretty ancient code at this point. 
> > Other than special devices like your DPU gadget, there
> > isn't any incentive to use or modernize them.  The PBM
> > driver was at one point a reasonable output path, but for
> > years now PNG has been better for any purpose I can think
> > of.
> 
> I hope we keep the PBM driver around

I wasn't proposed to dump it.  I was just trying to prioritize where
development effort is spent.  There are plenty of things to work on
that will benefit many terminal types (new plot modes, continued work
on internationalization, updated numerical routines) and other 
terminal types with more potential users (cairopdf). 

> -- I still use it fairly often 
> to generate individual frames for encoding into a movie with ppmtompeg
> (which only groks a limited set of native input formats: PPM, PNM,
> YUV, JPEG, and JMOVIE, but *not* PNG).

That's not much of a reason.
You could use the far more featureful png driver and interpose 
a png->pnm  filter in the output:
    set term png truecolor enhanced font "verdana,11"
    set output '| convert png:- mypic.pnm'

-- 
Ethan A Merritt