Re: problems revealed by new demos

[Daniel J S. <dan...@ie...>]

Hans-Bernhard Broeker wrote:

> Daniel J Sebald wrote:
>
>> No feeling on your main point, but I read through the patch comments 
>> because epslatex is one of my fav terminals.
>
>
> I suspect I'm the one among the developers who *uses* gnuplot least 
> frequently, so I don't have much of a favourite terminal driver, but 
> still, I have some points I'd like to make:
>
> *) we currently have *two* "combined ps + latex" drivers: pslatex
>    and epslatex.  Yet this discussion has been only about epslatex.
>    That doesn't seem right. In particular, it doesn't seem to make
>    sense to go about modifying one of them alone, instead of
>    collecting the best of both into a single, new one (while keeping
>    an eye on pstex, too). 


No doubt there.  What about this "pstricks".  Way back, I saw that one 
and thought to update the image drivers in there.  Then looking at it, 
it seemed so outdated that I wondered about its worth.  I tried running 
'all.dem' under pstricks; that soon failed.  I tried 'image.dem'; image 
don't pass through of course but some other elements in the plots 
failed.  pstricks is falling behind a bit.

I also just tried running gnuplot's "test" image through the epslatex 
terminal.  Running the "xdvi" on the compiled output files results in 
the polyfill not appearing.  Doing "dvips test -o test.ps" created a 
PostScript file that crashed on the polyfill.  As you are arguing above, 
if it works in PostScript, a seemless transition to related terminals 
should be expected.

> *) The two drivers have several differences.  Some of them are mainly
>    accidental, others were made intentionally.  I.e. there are things
>    in epslatex, like the particular choice of line type colours, that
>    were designed the way they are *because* someone wanted them to be
>    different from what pslatex does.  Harald's patch reverts some of
>    those decisions, which I'm not quite happy with. 


 From my understanding, EPS supposedly only differs from PS by the 
presence of the bounding box information.

Dan