Re: GPVAL_TERM_VCHAR (was: problem with "set x11 {size WW, HH} {position XX, YY}")

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

On Friday 13 February 2009 13:03:03 Ben Abbott wrote:
> 
> On Friday, February 13, 2009, at 01:04PM, "Ralf Juengling" <jue...@cs...> wrote:
> >
> >
> >On Fri, 13 Feb 2009, Ben Abbott wrote:
> >
> >>> I am strictly opposed to adding a "position" property to gnuplot's "set term"
> >>> commands.  If you require the ability to place multiple plots relative to
> >>> each other, then use multiplot mode and a larger canvas.
> >>>
> >>
> >> Ethan you convinced me that gnuplot's windows should not be moved by the "set term" command.
> >>
> >> Is there reason to not allow the windows to be opened at specific positions?
> >
> >I can't resist but to add my two cents.
> >
> >Ben was asking that gnuplot supports capabilities which are already
> >offered by a system's window manager. I think it is very useful to
> >be able to control, per script, the size and position of windows
> >opened by that script. But I agree with Ethan and others who
> >essentially said that gnuplot is the wrong place to add a solution
> >for this. The burden is on the Octave project to come up with a
> >cross-platform interface to the different window managers to
> >implement that capability. What is need from gnuplot is a way to
> >query the window ID or window handle of a terminal window.
> >
> >On a second thought, in Matlab you can program GUIs for your
> >application. And one may embedd plots in a GUI. That means, you
> >would need the capability to render a plot in a user-provided
> >canvas widget. The x11 terminal currently supports this, have
> >you looked at the gpdemos.tcl in gnuplot's demo directory?
> >It seems to me, this is what you really want to do, at the end
> >of the day.
> >
> >Ralf
> >
> 
> Good points ... worth more than 2c I think ;-)
> 
> I'll take a look at gpdemos.tcl.

In a similar vein, one could have the application open new browser
windows and tell gnuplot to fill them with plots generated using the canvas
or svg terminal. It might be tricky to do that via pipes rather than using
temp files, but it has obvious attractions as well. 

I am currently quite interested in exploring what kinds of things can
be done by using a browser as a generic interactive viewer, rather than 
requiring platform-speicific interactive viewers like gnuplot_x11, aquaterm,
or the development version of wxt.  Octave could be a neat example of this.
Consider, for example, a teaching workshop where the output from one master
Octave session is simultaneously visible in a browser window on each 
student's desktop - locally interactive, but driven remotely.


-- 
Ethan A Merritt