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

[Dima K. <gn...@di...>]

> On Sun, 23 Sep 2012 11:04:18 -0700
> "sfeam (Ethan Merritt)" <eam...@gm...> wrote:
>
> Several demos rely on "set size square", notably including
> 	poldat.dem polar.dem
> These work well with your patch.
> 
> We don't seem to have a demo that exercises "set view equal xyz".
> That would be a nice addition.
> 
> It's hard to make a test suite for manual interaction with the 
> terminal window.  What did you have in mind?

It would be a large undertaking to write a reliable tester that
actually looks at the generated output, so I'm not suggesting anything
in particular. I did manually test

- 2d, 3d plots
- pressing '7' and 'e' multiple times
- resizing windows
- starting with various aspect ratio settings
- all of the above in various combinations

I did NOT test

- multiplots
- switching terminals (i.e. making sure that nothing
  blows up when you set term pdf, and then set term x11 again)
- fancier x11 features, such as plotting into embedded windows
- any OS other than amd64 Debian
- any window manager other than ion3

These things are complicated, so subtle regressions may have been
introduced. I built a package with the patch, and will use it as my
everyday plotter for a while to at least exercise the common cases. If
some people on this list try it out as well, that'd be great.


> > 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 suppose so.  The x11 output goes through fewer layers of processing
> and buffer transfer.  Also it isn't being antialiased or
> oversampled. Still, for plots containing only points and lines I find
> the 3D response in both wxt and qt to be perfectly acceptable.
> 
> Both the wxt and qt terminals allow you to disable antialiasing and 
> oversampling;  that may or may not make a noticeable difference to
> your particular plots. 3D image plots are another story, slower,
> particularly in qt. 
> 
> Note the following caveat about the speed of qt rendering
> [from "help set term qt"]
>  
>  The Qt rendering speed is affected strongly by the rendering mode
> used. In Qt version 4.7 or newer this can be controlled by the
> environmental variable QT_GRAPHICSSYSTEM. The options are "native",
> "raster", or "opengl" in order of increasing rendering speed.  For
> earlier versions of Qt the terminal defaults to "raster".

When I did these tests a few months ago, x11 was by far the most
responsive, even after turning off all fancy rendering options in the
newer terminals (antialiasing and such). I'm perfectly happy to just
use the x11 terminal, so at least for me these aren't major issues.

dima