Re: extending pstricks terminal driver

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

On Thursday 18 December 2008, Mojca Miklavec wrote:

> > - ./configure currently installs gnuplot-lua-tikz.sty to
> > /usr/local/share/gnuplot/<version>/ but of course TeX doesn't know to look
> > for it there.  Where is the proper place to install this style file?
> 
> There is no proper place. (I have four TeX installations on my
> computer and it's neary impossible to figure out where this file
> belongs. Out of those 4 installations, one can install into HOME, into
> texmf-local, into the main tree etc.)

I think multiple TeX installations are not typical.
Is there a uniform mechanism to add a directory to TeX's search path?
Instead of guessing where are the existing directories, we could
simply add our own to the list as part of the installation process.
Isn't that what the kpathsea package is for?
 
> My proposal to Peter was to create that file by default in every
> folder where one wants to use it. It might make sense to install it
> globally, but since the terminal changes over time, it might be more
> safe to have a copy of the style wherever we are creating the plot,
> else older plots are likely to get broken when one would use a
> different sty file.

Ugh. That's a problem.  Are you saying that if you have older and
newer plots in the same directory, they will conflict with each other?
If so, then I think we must provide a versioning mechanism:
\usepackage{gnuplot-tikz-01}
Either that, or we must be clever enough to get it right the first
time and not introduce incompatible changes later on.

> It probably makes no sense to put that file anywhere. TeX does not
> find it under /usr/local/share/gnuplot and I would not find it either.
> Since the terminal is able to generate that file on the fly, I would
> not bother about trying to install it anywhere.

Sorry, that doesn't follow.  If you save the plots for later use with
a TeX document, you still need to have TeX able to find the appropriate
*.sty file even if gnuplot and the original lua code is no longer around.
They might be on a different machine or a different version.
 


-- 
Ethan A Merritt
Biomolecular Structure Center
University of Washington, Seattle 98195-7742