Re: Excessive memory usage with the pdfcairo terminal?

[Christoph B. <us...@be...>]

Ethan Merritt schrieb:
> 
> The long-standing admonition still holds. Vector formats like PostScript,
> PDF, SVG are bad choices for creating a plot with a million points.
> A bitmap format like PNG does much better.  "Ah", you say, 
> "but I asked cairo to produce a PNG file." Well yes, but that's not the way
> cairo works.  First it creates the requested graphic in a standard internal
> representation that maintains all the necessary information for vector output.
> Then when you are ready to dump it to a file, it converts the internal
> representation to the final output representation.
> Or at least that's how I understand it.
> 
> Time to revisit the idea of a pdflatex terminal?

How do you think would a pdflatex terminal solve this problem and what 
configuration do you have in mind for a pdflatex terminal?

In my eyes there are many different possibilities to realize a pdflatex 
terminal, but I don't see any advantages of this compared to the cairo 
terminals (apart from the mathematical typesetting).

Christoph