splitting terminals into groups

[Mojca M. <moj...@gm...>]

Dear list,

a seemingly endless list of terminals causes a lot of confusion before
somebody finds the terminal of choice.

Would it make sense to split them according to their usage into a few
categories, like:
- interactive
- images (binary, text-based; but that doesn't have to be split)
- for post-processing (mostly the latex-related ones)
- printing

I have written just a few examples (I left out many), just to get the idea:

interactive
             aqua  Interface to graphics terminal server for Mac OS X
             dumb  ascii art for anything that prints text
              x11  X11 Window System

images
           canvas  HTML Canvas object
              pdf  PDF (Portable Document File) file driver
         pdfcairo  pdf terminal based on cairo
              png  PNG images using libgd and TrueType fonts
         pngcairo  png terminal based on cairo
       postscript  PostScript graphics, including EPSF embedded files (*.eps)
              svg  W3C Scalable Vector Graphics driver

require for post-processing
              lua  Lua generic terminal driver
               mp  MetaPost plotting standard
         epslatex  LaTeX picture environment using graphicx package
            latex  LaTeX picture environment
          pslatex  LaTeX picture environment with PostScript \specials
            pstex  plain TeX with PostScript \specials
             tikz  TeX TikZ graphics macros via the lua script driver

printing
             pcl5  HP Designjet 750C, HP Laserjet III/IV, etc. (many options)
          hp2623A  HP2623A and maybe others
           hp2648  HP2648 and HP2647
             hpgl  HP7475 and relatives [number of pens] [eject]

(maybe another category of obsolete ones :)

That way it would be much easier to find the most suitable terminal to
do the job. I would also devote a column in the output to make it
clear whether some terminal creates vector or raster graphic.
(Possibly also a column for text/binary, but that is way less
important.)

Mojca