Re: gpic terminal

[Ethan A M. <sf...@us...>]

On Wednesday, 12 March, 2014 17:54:48 James Cloos wrote:
> Why was the gpic term disabled?

It seems reasonable to reduce the number of default terminal types
by omiting ones that are only of historical interest, or used only by 
legacy systems.   In part this is because egacy systems are probably
better served by running a contemporaneous version of gnuplot.
They can't make use of the new features anyhow, so why would
they want the latest version?  And if you were to configure a stripped
down version of the current source that is customized to a legacy
system, you'd want to tailor the set of selected terminals anyhow.

In any case the gpic terminal is still there -  "disabled by default" is not
the same thing as "deleted".  You can configure it in if you like.  

> Troff continues to have users, 

Does it?  Who?  Do they use the development version of gnuplot?

> and pic remains the preferred language for graphics in roff.
> 
> It is simple, but that is not unreasonable for many uses.
> 
> Incidently, I presume it would work with heirloom and plan9 troffs.
> Perhaps the docs shouldn't say it were only for groff?

Perhaps, but only if someone can attest this is indeed the case.
The documentation was written about 15 years ago, at the same
time as the driver itself.

It would be valuable to know if the gpic terminal actually works
with the current gnuplot.  The terminal code has not been modified 
since 1999 other than trivial changes to remove compiler warnings.
Do you know for certain that it does still work?

	Ethan

> 
> -JimC
> --
> James Cloos <cl...@jh...>         OpenPGP: 1024D/ED7DAEA6