Re: Plans for gnuplot version 5

[Karl-Friedrich R. <mai...@gm...>]

On 06.03.2014 00:45, Ethan A Merritt wrote:
> [point symbols]
> 
> Could you make that proposal more specific?
> 
> Back in 2008 during the run-up to release of version 4.4 various
> people put in a lot of work to make at least the first 8 point types
> common across all terminals.   
> 
> Are you saying that 8 is not enough?  
> That some terminals introduced since 2008 do not conform?
> 
> Either way it would help to have a specific proposal for how
> many and which symbols will be in the shared set.
> If there is a specific target, then I agree it would be reasonable
> to include that as a release criterion.
The first eight seem to be identical across terminals, no problem.
But windows has 15, cairo* 13, postscript 74 (!). (Origin 8.6 even
includes 117. OK, a few of them are really ugly. )

The high number would of course be desireable (not to use all of
them in one plot, but sometimes the piechart-points are just what i
want), although i see this would be a lot of work in every terminal.

Maybe more symbols could be added at minor releases, but the default
repeat cycle kept, so the new ones only appear if they're explicitly
enabled?

I however notice that the windows terminal points 8-15 are sorted
differently than in postscript. wxt is identical to ps, except for
the two missing 14+15.

Perhaps re-sort the windows terminal now, and add the pentagons to
wxt? Then we´d have sixteen identical symbols in many terminals. I´d
settle for that. ;-)

[Font handling]

> It is definitely not possible to offer the same font handling for all
> terminals.  It is not even possible to have a single terminal,
> e.g. libgd+png,  provide the same font handling across different
> operating systems and library versions. 
> 
> As to Feature Request 363, I agree that it would be nice to clean
> up support for requesting bold/italic/etc.    Since there is no 
> consistency in how to capture this in a font name, I suggest that
> a better approach is to extend the exhanced text mode to include
> LaTeX-like markup   {\it{italic text}  and \bf{boldface text}}
> Once the enhanced text code can handle the new tags,
> the underlying matchup to suitable fonts can be added one 
> terminal type at a time.   
> 
> I'm not sure whether this should hold up version 5, even 
> assuming someone is keen to work on it.

The LaTeX-like thing is probably a good idea. That way also
different fonts could be selected. (Have to, in fact, because i.e.
italics are a different font.) In the meantime it´d help if the
individual terminals handled the syntax less strict (some enforce
uppercase first letters on "Bold", some need commas, others spaces,
see FR 363).

That way there should be no issues regarding backward compatibility.

  Karl