Re: Mac installation cloning

[Jun T. <tak...@kb...>]

On 2016/03/04, at 9:22, Thomas Mattison <mat...@ph...> wrote:

> The main capability lacking from plain vanilla gnuplot built on my 10.6.8 Mac from source is the ability to make png or gif output.

Are you (or your students) going to create many (a series of) png
files? Then you will need "png" or "pngcairo" terminals, but either
of them requires several libraries. For example, "pngcairo" requires
lbpng and pango/cairo, pango requires glib, and cairo requires pixman.

If you will only occasionally create a few png files, then you can
use Aquaterm.app to save the plot in pdf file, and use Preview.app
to convert it to png (or jpeg, tiff, gif; you need to option-click
the format menu to enable gif in the save dialog).
Or you can type cmd-C in Aquaterm to copy the plot to the clipboard,
switch to Preview, and type cmd-N to create a new picture from
the clipboard. Then you can save it as png etc.

Building a "clonable" gnuplot with lots of terminals would be (very)
tedious, if not impossible. How about staring with just "aqua" terminal
and try it for some time to see whether it is enough for your students?

Aquaterm, however, has no mouse/keyboard support. For example, you can
not rotate the 3D plot (splot) by mouse. If this is not acceptable,
then you need either "qt" or "wxt" terminal.
"wxt" requires wxWidgets and pango/cairo and harder to build, but
once pango/cairo is installed then "pngcairo" can also use it.
"qt" terminal requires Qt, but Qt has a standard Mac installer
(all of your student must run the installer by themselves, but the
same applies to the Aquaterm installer).