Re: Set pagesize [was Re: Clipping of arrows buggy]

[Harald H. <h.h...@tu...>]

On Fri, 21 Jan 2005, Ethan Merritt wrote:

> On Friday 21 January 2005 11:33 am, Harald Harders wrote:
> >
> > > > gnuplot does not control the size of the X window,
> > >
> > > And it shouldn't.  I.e., x11.trm should ignore 'set pagesize'.
> >
> > I don't understand why not. It should get a default window size by the X
> > resources, of course. But why the user shall not be able to produce two
> > x11 terminal windows with different size in one session? You cannot change
> > the X resources between two plots of one gnuplot session. But why not
> > provide to produce different window sizes?
>
> That's not the point.  Sure, you could start out with any window
> size you like. But after you have opened the window, the size can be
> changed externally by the user. So the gnuplot core code cannot
> assume that it knows the current size of the window.
>
> It would be possible to have gnuplot_x11 update the values
> of term->xmax and term->ymax via the mousing pipe. You'll find
> a commented out bit of code that does so.
> But doing this breaks various assumptions in the gnuplot core.
> I know it does, because I tried it; that's why the code
> is there but commented out.  To fix all these you would have to
> make explicit use of term->xmax and term->ymax in many places that
> do not  currently check them at all. This might be worth doing,
> but it goes in exactly the opposite direction of your current patch.

Thus, I understand it in this way: It was a good thing if gnuplot could
handle different window sizes but it is too hard to provide that
functionality starting from gnuplot's source code.

> > Some terminals already have an own mechanism to change the size. The
> > question now is how to handle a pagesize that differs from the default
> > value in conjunction with an explicit size given in the 'set terminal'
> > command. Shall the pagesize be overwritten by the terminal size or shall
> > both values be multiplicated?
>
> I am not clear on exactly what problem you are trying to fix
> with this work. Would it suffice for your purposes if there
> were a 'set term post ...' option that explicitly set the
> BoundingBox?

Yes, for me it is enough if the Postscript terminal (and with it hopefully
also the epslatex terminal when the epslatex patch will be applied to cvs
somedays) has the capability to take an option to change the page size -
because I am only using this terminal.  But I think it was a better
approach to provide a unique command that changes the size of the page for
all capable terminals.

There is, for example, another option that has started from one terminal
and is now available for many terminals: enhanced text. In my opionion,
something like 'set text enhanced' would be better than chosing it for
every terminal in a different way. You may say that not every terminal
supports enhanced text. But there are enough other things that are not
supported by all terminals and still not in the terminal command, for
example, filled arrow heads.

If we cannot reach a consensus on a global 'set pagesize' command that
changes the page size (it really may be realised in a different way than I
have done it) I will provide a patch that gives the BoundingBox for the
postscript terminal because this is all I need personally. Nevertheless I
think, for gnuplot in general, a global 'set pagesize' command should be
available.

-- 
Harald Harders
h.h...@tu...
http://www.harald-harders.de