Re: gd.trm and multiple plots with png

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

Hans-Bernhard Broeker wrote:

> Jim Kleckner wrote:
>
>> I have also wanted to create GIF animations.  How hard is it to
>> crack them back apart into individual images?
>
>
> I don't know.  But it shouldn't be excessively hard --- even Java's 
> AWT can do it ;-)
>
>> Note that the
>> current behavior for GIF and PNG is to lose all plots subsequent
>> to the first one.
>
>
> In the existing framework, that's one of only two possibly sane ways 
> of doing it (the other: keep only the last page).
>
> > Would it make sense to define an option to
>
>> write these subsequent plots to sequentially numbered files?
>
>
> It might, if someone manages to pull it off and find an understandable
> user interface.  I would imagine something like
>
>     set output 'filename' numbered
>
> (maybe with some options to control how the numbers are put into the 
> name).
>
> The main benefit of this approach would be that it would work for 
> other file-based terminal drivers, too.


With that approach, perhaps "multi" should be a keyword because it is 
similar in concept to multiplot, agree?  Just yesterday I could have 
used something like this to generate PNG files from a series of graphs 
in Octave.  It beats doing a "mv output.png output1.png" after every 
plot.  On the other hand, I just used the PDF file format because there 
everything is "packaged" automatically and there is a viewer to go along 
with it.  The problem with PDF, however, is it's usual benefit.  If one 
has a plot with many, many sample points, the series of plots gets 
rather big.

I'd still like the terminal to create a single file for animation if 
possible.  That just seems so much nicer.  Guess I see the application 
for both.

Dan