Re: [PATCH] x11 terminal respects the requested aspect ratio

[Daniel J S. <dan...@ie...>]

On 09/22/2012 06:14 PM, gn...@di... wrote:
> Hi all.
>
> I tackled the long-standing issue of the x11 terminal not respecting the
> requested plot aspect ratio. There have been many bugs about this on the
> tracker. The main one appears to be
>
> http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=3331162&group_id=2055&atid=102055
>
> I have a branch that handles this issue similar to the way the wxt
> terminal does:
>
> - inboard driver computes a particular x,y scale factors
> - terminal ALWAYS respects this aspect ratio
> - resizing the window does NOT touch the aspect ratio
> - a replot is required to re-compute the scale factors
>
> Similar to the qt terminal, I added a replot-on-resize option to make
> things 'just work', at the expense of some extra cpu cycles.
>
> The code works for my test cases, but I had to touch enough stuff to
> make me concerned about cases that I missed. How are such changes
> tested, usually? I didn't see a test suite.
>
> The code is in a git repo at
>
> https://github.com/dkogan/gnuplot
>
> I'm also attaching a patch for a diff from the latest code in CVS, as
> of Sep 2012.
>
> As an aside, the main reason I'm touching the x11 terminal at all
> (instead of just moving to wxt or qt) is that it appears to be much
> faster than the newer terminals. Particularly, if you have a 3d plot
> with lots of points, interactively rotating the data is noticeably much
> snappier with x11. Is this expected?

I'm not sure many of us here know what to expect given limited 
experience with Qt.  I thought I had read there is somewhere that Qt can 
be tweaked to refresh at a faster rate.  I suspect too that Qt terminal 
is doing much more internally, such as anti-aliasing and/or alpha 
scaling.  X11 terminal is really efficient code but has limited features 
on account of the limited nature of X terminals.

Anyway, I think X11 is still something good to have around.  Some 
systems might not have Qt installed for whatever reason.

Dan