Re: Intermittent error plotting images with the x11 terminal

[Ethan M. <merritt@u.washington.edu>]

On Sunday, 07 April 2013, Jonathan Thornburg wrote:
> On Sun, 7 Apr 2013, Ethan Merritt wrote:
> > Or maybe hardly anyone is using x11 anymore.  I know I strongly prefer
> > either wxt or qt to the x11 terminal.  I'm not saying we shouldn't fix
> > this if possible, but the reality is that I view the x11 terminal as having 
> > been superseded by newer, more capable terminal options.  There
> > are many things that it just doesn't handle very well (font scaling,
> > non-ascii encodings, transparency, anti-aliasing, ...).
> 
> I very much hope we retain full support for the x11 terminal. 

Sure, for a definition of "full support" that includes acknowledging that 
the x11 terminal doesn't provide the entire current set of features.

> x11 is (and remains) my strongly-preferred interactive terminal for two key
> reasons:
> * x11 builds easily & cleanly even if 3rd-party libraries are broken
>   or live in odd places

I can see that being an advantage if you find yourself having to
rebuild from source on lots of different machines.  It doesn't count
for much in cases where you can run pre-built binaries, whether they
were provided by a distro or self-built on a fully-configured machine
for deployment on less completely configured machines like in a
computer lab.

> * x11 respects X resource specifications in ~/.Xdefaults
>   (e.g. I have the line  "gnuplot*reverseVideo: on" there, so x11 comes
>   up with a black background.  wxt ignores that and comes up with a white
>   background which I find ugly.  I don't know what qt does.)

The qt terminal provides a widget for selecting the background color.  
The choice is saved in ~/.qt/qtrc.

Current gnuplot allows you to place linetype preferences in your
~/.gnuplot initialization file, which is a more general solution than
using X resources.

	Ethan

> ciao,
> 
>