Re: disabling 'insecure' parts of gnuplot file

[Edward P. <es...@pg...>]

On Tue, Aug 31, 2004 at 04:29:04PM -0700, Ethan Merritt wrote:
> On Monday 30 August 2004 12:56 pm, Edward Peschko wrote:
> > 
> > I'm writing an application whose intent is to take a gnuplot file, turn it into a
> > PNG graph, and then display that graph online.
> 
> > IE: it would be up to the user to use programs
> > to create data, etc. which would then be uploaded to mediawiki.
> 
> I took a step back to think about what you said you want to do,
> and now I am puzzled.  If the external user is writing the gnuplot script,
> then I presume they know how to use gnuplot.  You also say that the
> external user will be generating the data.  So why can't they just run
> the script themselves and upload the resulting png file to the wiki,
> rather than uploading the script and having the wiki's host machine
> run it there?

Because the whole idea was to make it so:

	a) other people can reproduce the graph
	b) other people can see the data used to generate the graph
	c) other people can modify the data used to generate the graph, or modify
           the layout.

You lose lots in the translation to the PNG - just like you lose lots when you
edit an illustrator or PSP file and don't save it in their native format.

Ed