Re: Excessive memory usage with the pdfcairo terminal?

[Allin C. <cot...@wf...>]

On Fri, 8 Oct 2010, Ethan Merritt wrote:

> On Friday 08 October 2010 02:07:42 am Christoph Bersch wrote:
> > 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?
>
> I assume that the goal is to end up with a PDF file that contains
> a plot constructed from an unreasonably large number of
> points...

Isn't the best solution to down-sample the plot? Embedding a
bitmap in PDF output seems retrograde to me (although I do see how
it addresses the problem at hand). People often read PDFs
on-screen and then it's nice to have the non-text material in
vector form (resize at will).

Allin Cottrell