Re: TikZ terminal

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

On Friday 26 December 2008, Peter Hedwig wrote:
> Am Dienstag, 23. Dezember 2008 schrieb Ethan A Merritt:
> > On Monday 22 December 2008, Mojca Miklavec wrote:
> > > Hello,
> > >
> > > here are a few suggestions for the new TikZ terminal:
> > >
> > > 1.) I would rename gnuplot.lua into tikz.lua or gnuplot-tikz.lua. The
> > > terminal lua is generic, but gnuplot.lua is TikZ-specific.
> 
> Yes.
> 
> > > 2.) I would require calling
> > >    set term tikz
> > > or
> > >    set term lua tikz
> > > and not
> > >    set term lua
> > >
> > > Lua is a generic driver and would not tell anything to the user that
> > > wants to plot something in TeX.
> >
> > How about using a scheme similar to the cairo-based terminals
> > pdfcairo and pngcairo.  The current terminal would have the full name
> > tikzlua, and the short form "tikz" would work unless/until someone
> > writes a pure tikz terminal that doesn't use lua (just as the old
> > pdf and png terminals don't use cairo).
> 
> The downside is that we need to touch lua.trm for every new backend script 
> then.  

Are you thinking this will be common?  It's not as if people have been
contributing new drivers every couple of weeks...

> What about "luatikz"?  This would call the Lua terminal for every  
> luaXY, no? Then the terminal can look for a script named gnuplot-XY.lua.

Other than the worry that my fingers will type "lunatics" instead,
it's OK with me.

> > > If one writes metapost.lua then one could for example call
> > >     set term lua metapost
> > > to invoke that file.

That would also be OK.

> The infrastructure for this is in, it just needs to return more values...
> 
> > > 4.) Help should also be returned via
> > >    help term tikz
> > >
> > > Now set term lua help returns something useful, but help term tikz
> > > should be more informative as well.
> 
> This could turn out as a real problem if we don't move the help text to 
> lua.trm.  And this would spoil the idea of keeping the terminal and the script 
> separated.
> 
> > > 5.) Maybe there could be
> > >    gnuplot.lua
> > > that has a list of available terminals, for example a list containing
> > > "tikz" terminal with both terminal name and filename that needs to be
> > > included to make that terminal work properly.
> 
> I think this is also related to the decision if we keep the terminal and the 
> script separated.
> 
> While I would like to keep them separated, I don't know how to fix the help 
> system then :-(

Maybe the build system could run the lua script and cat the output into
"allterm.h"?

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