Re: width of text in latex terminals

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

On Monday 14 March 2005 09:45 am, Robert Hart wrote:
> On Mon, 2005-03-14 at 09:22 -0800, Ethan Merritt wrote:
> > There is a new dummy driver in the current cvs version called
> > "estimate.trm" that is used internally to do exactly what you 
> > want for strings using gnuplot's own enhanced text mode.
> > 
> > But that is not going to get you a full TeX interpreter inside
> > gnuplot.  
> 
> so, in principle, if I added an "enhanced" mode to the pslatex driver,
> it would be able to give gnuplot an *estimate* of the length of a latex
> fragment, but actually just output the text in an unenhanced way? 

I don't think so.  gnuplot's enhanced text mode has its own syntax and 
conventions, and they are not the same as TeX/LaTeX.  So I'm pretty
sure feeding a TeX command string to gnuplot's enhanced text parser
will not produce useful information.

> The enhanced mode functions don't seem to be documented in term/README

The enhanced text mode was originally part of the postscript driver (only).
It was later extended to apply to other drivers as well. But the basic
documentation files are still hiding in .../docs/psdoc/
They should probably move to a more general location.

If you were looking for specific details of the driver entry points
used by enhanced text mode, that's another story.   The implementation
in dumb.trm was intended as a simplest-case example of how to add
support to a new driver.  Beyond that simplest case, however, each
terminal type is a bit different in its needs.

	hope that helps


-- 
Ethan A Merritt       merritt@u.washington.edu
Biomolecular Structure Center
Mailstop 357742
University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195