Fast image markup?

[Dima K. <gn...@di...>]

Hi.

Can somebody chime in on how hard/trivial a new feature would be?

A common use case for me is to mark-up images. So gnuplot would plot an
image, and render stuff on top of it. Something like this:

  plot "image.jpg" binary filetype=auto flipy with rgbimage, ...

This works, but it is always really slow, and if I'm on a machine that's
not ridiculously overpowered, it runs out of memory.

My images are several 1000 pixels per side. So big, but not giant. I
THINK gnuplot is loading each pixel in the image into a separate point
to be plotted, which makes sense given how flexible this is. But 99% of
the time for ME, I'm just plotting the image exactly as it is, with
maybe some independent scaling in x and y. Would it be massively
effortful to detect that the user is trying to do the simple thing, and
to run a different code path that treats the image as an image, and is
thus fast?

Implementation suggestions? Would we want another terminal command for
this?

Thanks