Re: demo stuff

[Ethan M. <merritt@u.washington.edu>]

On Wednesday 18 August 2004 01:12 am, Hans-Bernhard Broeker wrote:
> > The following demos are not in all.dem:
> >     borders.dem

No opinion

> >     candlesticks.dem

That's a clear oversight. It should go in.

> >     charset.dem
> >     enhancedtext.dem

Charset.dem is not so much a demo as it is a means of testing
particular settings for terminal, character encoding and choice of 
font. It makes no sense to automate this.

Enhancedtext.dem only works on terminal types supporting
the enhanced text mode, and only makes sense if the 
current terminal is in enhanced text mode.   We don't
have a general command inside gnuplot to turn on 
enhanced text mode for the current terminal. Maybe 
we should. Anyhow there is not currently a way to 
make this work from inside all.dem

> > fontfile.dem and fontfile_latex.dem aren't in  
> > all.dem, but on purpose I think. 

fontfile and fontfile_latex are both terminal-specific. So these
are in the same category as charset.dem.  They do not belong in
an automated terminal-independent test.

> >     multiplt.dem (such a nice demo)
> >     vector.dem (another nice demo)

I don't know if there is a reason for these being omitted.
I agree that they should probably be added to all.dem

> >     starmap.dem (another nice demo)

This one is already there; it's called from inside datastrings.dem,

> > mousevariables.dem,

mousevariables.dem only makes sense interactively, so I don't
think it can go into all.dem

> > Not finding the font files will cause gnuplot to error out.  Maybe they
> > could be put at the very end of all.dem so that if they do crash,
> > nothing will be missed. 

If the idea is to confirm that the font commands work, then we could
include a test font in the demo directory and use that for the test.

But I think the bigger issue is that all of the font exercising demos
require customization of the terminal, which is inconsistent with the
current mechanism of 'make check'.  You can do 'setenv GNUTERM <foo>',
but I don't know of any way to pass parameters like font selection or
enhanced text mode. 

Now that the issue has been raised, I do think it might be nice to
have a command something on order of
	set textmode enhanced

This would instruct gnuplot to use enhanced text mode for any
terminal that supports it.  I run into this all the time, because I
routinely preview scripts in x11 and then re-run them to produce
png or eps files.  As it is I have to either do this interactively or
write explicit terminal selections into the script.

-- 
Ethan A Merritt       merritt@u.washington.edu
Biomolecular Structure Center
Mailstop 357742
University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195