Re: Proposal: Saving graphs from Qt and wxt terminals

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

On Monday, 27 October, 2014 21:30:04 pl...@pi... wrote:
> On 10/27/14 19:53, Ethan A Merritt wrote:
> > I've added to cvs for 5.0 and 5.1 a toggle button in the wxt tools widget.
> >
> > The very first time you use it, the state of the toggle button may not be
> > reported correctly because the corresponding state variable doesn't exist
> > in your previous saved-state file.  But once you've exited the program
> > that first time, causing the saved-state to be updated, everything should work
> > correcly in subsequent sessions.
> >
> > I also have code to add save-to-png-file to the wxt toolbar.
> > But I haven't worked with this toolkit before and I haven't found a
> > decent worked example to show how to embed this in a pull-down menu.
> > So as before ...
> >
> >> >Patches welcome.
> > 	Ethan
> >
> 
> Nice addition Ethan, thanks for putting that in. Having to hit replot 
> every time I resize wxt was always a drag but never seemed important 
> enough to mention.  I'm not sure what purpose there is in the toggle 
> option, when is it useful to have the plot temporarily not match the new 
> terminal size?  

If you resize a complex 3D plot (e.g. the ones in transparent_solids.dem)
resizing the window can get really slow.  Same thing for a comutationally
intensive 2D plot. It gets  _really_ slow in some cases.  For instance, 
I have some data-plotting scripts that take ~5 seconds to redraw the plot.
Not so bad if the reason for redrawing is to change the data file.
But resizing the plot triggers the redraw multiple times, so it can be
more than a minute before the display settles down again.
I would normally keep this option "off".

A better fix would be to only refresh when the resizing operation stops.
I'm sure that's possible, but would require bookkeeping that isn't in there
at present.

	Ethan

> Surely if the user resizes the terminal it is with the 
> intention to resize the graph, which will happen next time anything is 
> plotted or replotted.
> 
> I'm not a hard-line GUI minimalist but this toggle seems like feature 
> clutter.
> 
> Peter.