Aw: Re: 5.2 rc2 tarball now available

[Bastian M. <bma...@we...>]

> 2) Qt text boxes
> 
> I have modified the "test" command to show both the true bounding box
> as used by the current terminal (shaded rectangle) and the generic
> estimated bounding box used by the core program to reserve space for
> text in a plot layout.  It seems some Qt versions report an inaccurate
> bounding box width for some fonts (e.g. Qt 5.6.2 + DejaVu Sans).
> Nevertheless the terminal's internal bounding box is always more accurate
> than the generic estimated box.
> 
> Dan Sebald has pointed out that the Qt terminal and the cairo terminals
> differ in whether they increase the lower bound of the bounding box to
> allow for font descenders.   This is probably fixable but I consider it a
> minor issue.  

For the Windows terminal the new grey box in the "test" output is much
larger than the "estimated" bounding box. That should be fixed.

> 
> 3) caca terminal still EXPERIMENTAL?
> 
> I have libcaca 0.99 beta18.  The gnuplot caca terminal reports:
> set term caca driver list
>     x11 gl slang ncurses raw null
> 
> For me the x11 and gl options are usable although the x11 font handling
> has artifacts.  slang and ncurses spew garbage.  raw and null cause
> segfaults.  Most of the time changing a caca option causes gnuplot to exit.
> So yes, I think we need to warn that the caca terminal is still EXPERIMENTAL.

Moreover caca does currently not accept keyboard or mouse input in wgnuplot.
(But works using console mode gnuplot on Windows).
Btw. if ncurses or slang drivers work strongly depends on the terminal used.

> 
> 4) autoconfigure/compile on SunOS
> 
> Minor issues only.  The demo for building and linking plugins does
> not autoconfigure correction but can be built manually following instructions
> in the plugin demo Makefile.
> See also various notes attached to Bug #1821
> 
> 5) Unwanted inclusion of Type 3 fonts in cairo pdf output
> 
> The is Bug #1868.  No fix known.   Not a release-blocker.
> It would be great if someone would pursue this with the cairographics
> project maintainers.
> 
> 6) Any other known issues?
> 

The qt terminal on Windows has several known issues without known solution:

1. Slow start-up of first plot command:  On my system the first plot in a 
session is only shown with as much as 8 seconds delay. As indicated by Dan
 Sebald, this might (again) be related to fontconfig, see also Octave bug 
https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?45458 . We had that problem before with 
cairo/pango based terminals and first solved it by adding additional 
configuration files to the binary distribution (and later by not using 
fontconfig any more).
2. After space-raise-console, the first character which is input on the
 command line is lost.
3. replot-on-resize does not work as intended, see bug #1081.  We should
mention this in the release notes and recommend to turn that feature off
for now.

  Bastian