Re: extending pstricks terminal driver

[Juergen W. <wie...@fr...>]

> > 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!

I think so, too.  But nevertheless the TikZ terminal seems quite
promising.

> 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)

Peter has kindly uploaded his terminal to the patches tracker recently:

http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=2183264&group_id=2055&atid=302055

He writes that he has no objections in changing the license.


> 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.

TikZ is not really a pure TeX based solution.  As I understand
things it works mostly like PSTricks but with more than one back
end, i.e. PS as well as PDF.  Nevertheless I ran into exceeding
memory when there were three images in TeX memory at the same time.


Juergen