Re: Win32 printing

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Russell Lang wrote:

>> That would be putting it mildly.  As of the current release
>> version, 4.0, the 16-bit version no longer even compiles.

> So do you want all 16-bit code removed?

Not per se.  If it falls off the table as part of some major renovation,
I can accept that, but there's not (yet) a good reason to kill that code
just because we can.

>> And the 32-bit version is known to have various problems.
>> Apparently, it never worked on Win9x at all.  Neither the "print
>> this" menu entry in the graph context menu, nor the 'set output
>> 'PRN:' method.

> Neither of these should have been broken in the move to 32-bit.

AFAIK, they were broken by differences between Win9x and Windows NT.
I.e. they only failed on 9x --- a rather unusual thing, really.
Usually, it's the tougher restrictions of the NT family that break code,
not the loose ones on 9x.

[...]
>> particular, I would really like to get rid of the home-grown
>> terminal emulator and all the problems and limitations it causes.

> Doing it on one thread may be a little tricky.

May be.  I'm quite sure it won't be any trickier than the home-grown
terminal emulation already is.

Other than that, I'd say we use whatever does the job.  The main issue
to keep an eye on would be the mouse feedback stuff.  I.e. the main
input loop of gnuplot now needs to listen to *two* input streams:
the command input (console, redirection or some script file), and the
mouse feedback.  That's about the only thing that was easier in the
existing Windows version than in X11.  The X11 synchronization details
(select(), <stdio.h> buffering, blocking pipes, ...) took us most of
three years to (somewhat) finally sort out.

> Do you want gnuplot to provide the command line editing, or do you 
> want the default Windows command line editor?

I got an experimental version going around August 2003, which has
gnuplot's -DREADLINE set, i.e. gnuplot does the command-line editing,
Windows just giving us keystrokes.  It's not completely done (i.e. the
wtext.c window still shows up, but is non-functional), but it's at least
marginally usable.