Re: extending pstricks terminal driver

[Christoph B. <us...@be...>]

Hi,

I haven't worked much with TikZ and I can speak only for myself as a 
gnuplot user:

Mojca Miklavec wrote:
> 
> Concerning the question about pstricks terminal: in my opinion it
> would make much more sense to work on TikZ terminal than on PSTricks.

I work on the PSTricks terminal because I do a lot with PSTricks. For 
myself I usually use the eps or epslatex terminal for most of my gnuplot 
diagrams. I just want the PSTricks terminal to be more complete and 
usable for the people who want to use it :-)

> Fixing PSTricks terminal still makes sense if there are minor patches.
> For the rest, I would claim that TikZ should become *the* (La)TeX
> terminal of the future.

As far as im in it, one of the ideas behind gnuplot is to be as portable 
as possible and to support a great variety of different output formats. 
So there will hardly ever be a discussion of favoring one format over 
another from the developer side. This choice is up to the user!

For use with LaTeX you have a lot of different formats to choose from.

Just to mention a possible drawbacks of pure TeX terminals:
While working on the PSTricks terminal, I noticed that the pm3d support 
is very limited as the large number of polygons needed for the plot 
require a lot of TeX main memory. As TikZ is also TeX based, it could be 
that you run into similar problems also with this terminal.

> Somebody already started the effort:
>      http://peter.affenbande.org/gnuplot/
> 
> My (context) terminal enables changing line style or colors on the fly
> (after running gnuplot) - the feature  that Christoph mentioned as one
> thing that could be done with PSTricks. But it is not usable in LaTeX,
> just as PSTricks is not usable with pdfTeX, so this makes it usable
> for a much smaller audience.

PSTricks can be used with pdflatex in dvi output mode (this is the 
default for 'latex' on most newer systems). Or, with the package 
'pst-pdf', directly with pdflatex ;-)
And again: it shouldn't be a developer decision which terminal the users 
'want' to use.

> However, one should *really* take a look at what Peter did on the link
> above. I did not test the terminal too much. I want to send him some
> patches, but really ... one should take a look and consider including
> it.

I think you should ask Peter why he did not contact the gnuplot 
developer for including his terminal. Maybe its an issue with the 
license?! (lua terminal is under GPL license)

Christoph

PS: I forwarded the mail to the gnuplot mailing list