Re: exposing cairo context from gnuplot

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

On Thursday 10 September 2009 02:34:07 Richard Henwood wrote:
> On Wed, 2009-09-09 at 08:42 -0700, Ethan Merritt wrote:
> <snip>
> > 
> > I'm not a gtk programmer, but there's always Google...
> > which leads me to the plplot project on SourceForge. It seems that
> > plplot is somewhat similar to gnuplot in intent, but the relevant point
> > is that they recently added an external cairo terminal driver "extcairo"
> > that so far as I can tell from the description does exactly what you want.
> > If it works for them, I don't see why it wouldn't work for us.
> > Anyonw have time to check out the code and report back on how the
> > information to open the context is passed?
> 
> I've had a quick look at what I think the relevant bits of PLplot are.
> 
> 1. The extcairo driver within PLplot requires an existing cairo context
> to be provided to it.
> 2. PLplot then draws over the context and returns.
> 
> there is a useful post provided by the author of the extcairo driver:
> http://www.mail-archive.com/plp...@li.../msg01273.html
> and example usage:
> http://plplot.sourcearchive.com/documentation/5.9.2/ext-cairo-test_8c-source.html

Hmm.
Their use of the word "external" doesn't match mine, if that's an example of it.
In the URL you point to, it's just that a routine in plplot itself initializes
cairo and then passes it to the driver.  What we would be looking for is an
example of one process initializing a cairo context and then passing a handle
to another process entirely.  Which may or may not be possible - I just dont know.


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