Re: [Plplot-devel] Some improvements to and evaluation of the pdf device driver

[Werner S. <sm...@ia...>]

Hi Alan,

thanks for fixing the pdf driver. I'll continue work on the pdf driver  
quite soon and see if I can fix the remaining problems.

Regards,
Werner

On Aug 15, 2009, at 7:15 AM, Alan W. Irwin wrote:

> Hi Werner:
>
> I recently did a build of -DDEFAULT_ALL_DEVICES=ON and ran into some  
> minor
> build troubles with your pdf device driver (based on the haru  
> library) which I
> have now fixed (as of revision 10259).  The worst of these was I was  
> running
> into header troubles and a showstopper build problem on Linux (using  
> a newly
> downloaded and built libharu-2.1.0).  The culprit was the - 
> DHPDF_SHARED
> compile option for non windows builds.  When that was removed, all  
> was well.
> You also may have to fiddle with -DHPDF_* options in cmake/modules/ 
> pdf.cmake
> to get this device to build properly on Windows and Mac OS X with
> libharu-2.1.0.
>
> Once I had pdf.so built properly, I evaluated it in the build tree  
> of the
> installed examples using
>
> SRC_EXAMPLES_DIR=${CMAKE_CURRENT_SOURCE_DIR}
> ${CMAKE_CURRENT_SOURCE_DIR}/plplot-test.sh --verbose --front-end=c -- 
> device=pdf
>
> where
> CMAKE_CURRENT_SOURCE_DIR=/home/software/plplot_cvs/installcmake/ 
> share/plplot5.9.4/examples
> for my particular case.
>
> Running all 31 C examples for the pdf device that way showed no  
> obvious
> problems other than a segfault for C example 24.
>
> Here is the full message from a standalone example 24 run with the  
> pdf device:
>
> software@raven> c/x24c -dev pdf -o test.pdf
> ERROR: error_no=1050, detail_no=0
> Segmentation fault
>
> I don't have time/libharu expertise to look into this segfault any  
> further,
> but I assume libhpdf (from the libharu-2.1.0 package) is returning  
> that
> ERROR message, and the segfault occurs because that error is not  
> handled
> properly by the pdf device.
>
> The pdf results from the above test looked fine using gv except for  
> examples
> 10, 15, 17, 24, and 30.  I think the issues with examples 10 (box  
> and text
> position), 15 (pattern fill spacing), and 17 (legend position) are all
> related; my guess is these issues are due to the driver failing to  
> properly
> initialize all required PLplot coordinate system parameters. I have  
> already
> discussed the example 24 segfault above.  Example 30 shows this  
> driver does
> not yet support transparent colours.
>
> The special rendering test, examples/python/ 
> test_superscript_subscript.py
> gives excellent looking results for the pdf device without any  
> changes on my
> part (the off-list report I got from a user about such problems for  
> the "pdf
> device" probably was referring to either the pdfqt or pdfcairo  
> device.)
>
> To summarize, it is probably still worthwhile to work on this driver  
> since
> the single libharu dependency is much simpler than the many different
> pango/cairo or Qt4 libraries that our pdfcairo and pdfqt devices  
> depend on.
> I now have the pdf.so build problems straightened out on Linux (at  
> least for
> libharu-2.1.0) and most standard examples look good on that platform.
> Finally, when you do have some spare time to continue work on this  
> driver, I
> hope these notes on the remaining small number of issues that I  
> found will
> be useful.
>
> Alan
> __________________________
> Alan W. Irwin
>
> Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and  
> Astronomy,
> University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).
>
> Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state  
> implementation
> for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting  
> software
> package (plplot.org); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the  
> Loads of
> Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project
> (lbproject.sf.net).
> __________________________
>
> Linux-powered Science
> __________________________


--
Dr. Werner Smekal
Institut fuer Allgemeine Physik
Technische Universitaet Wien
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Austria
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