Re: crash bug in pdf terminal

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

On Tuesday 26 October 2004 01:31 am, Daniel J Sebald wrote:
> I'm running into some quirks with the pdf terminal that I can't recall 
> in the past.  I returned to some octave code and got some crashes where 
> there were none before.  The PostScript and X11 terminals still work 
> fine with the script in question.

Please see also bug #1039296 "PDFlib Lite 6 output is broken for pipes, stdout"

The problem is that PDFlib changed substantially from version 5
to version 6.  In an attempt to satisfy both, Hans-Bernhard changed pdf.trm

2004-07-08  Hans-Bernhard Broeker  <br...@ph...>
        * term/pdf.trm (PDF_init): Call PDF_open_file() instead of 
        no longer existing function PDF_open_fp().

But at the current state of the code, neither version of PDFlib is
entirely happy.

 
> Here is one that I discovered in playing around with gnuplot.  Generate 
> a plot to the PDF terminal without having defined the output file:
> 
> gnuplot> set terminal pdf
> Terminal type set to 'pdf'
> Options are 'noenhanced fname 'Helvetica'  fsize 6 linewidth 1.0 '
> gnuplot> plot x
> gnuplot> set output
> PDFlib runtime error: Must call PDF_get_buffer() after PDF_close()
> 
> Obviously, what I've done above is an incorrect procedure.  However, it 
> would be nice if gnuplot not crash after issuing an appropriate error 
> message.
> 
> 
> I get a different PDFlib error in Octave.  Think I've found the problem 
> with a few number of gnuplot commands:
> 
> gnuplot> set terminal pdf
> Terminal type set to 'pdf'
> Options are 'noenhanced fname 'Helvetica'  fsize 6 linewidth 1.0 '
> gnuplot> set output 'junk.pdf'
> gnuplot> set bmargin 0
> gnuplot> plot x
> PDFlib value error: floating point value too large in pdf_ftoa
> 
> (Setting bmargin to zero makes sense in multiplot mode.)  Now, if I try:
> 
> set term pdf
> set output 'junk.pdf'
> set bmargin 0
> set xtics offset 0,graph 0.5
> plot x
> set output
> 
> things work fine.  And using "set xtics offset 0,graph -0.5" in the 
> above (which should result in the tic text off the PDF plot area) causes 
> the same crash with pdf_ftoa.  So the problem may be placing text 
> partially or fully off the screen... or perhaps not the screen, but the 
> graph area... not sure.
> 
> Ethan, it has been several months since I've used the particular Octave 
> script that leads to this problem, so I'm sure there've been many 
> changes since that time and likely won't recall anything having changed, 
> but any thoughts?  Can I help pin this down?
> 
> I just tried:
> 
> set term pdf
> set output 'junk.pdf'
> set xtics offset 0,graph -0.5
> plot x
> set output
> 
> and that fails too, so the "bmargin 0" has nothing to do with the problem.
> 
> Dan
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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-- 
Ethan A Merritt       merritt@u.washington.edu
Biomolecular Structure Center
Mailstop 357742
University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195