Re: [Plplot-devel] Qt(5) problems

[Schwartz, S. J <s.s...@im...>]

Hi Alan,

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Alan W. Irwin [mailto:ir...@be...]
> Sent: 28 August 2017 22:39
> To: Ole Streicher <deb...@li...>
> Cc: plp...@li...
> Subject: Re: [Plplot-devel] Qt(5) problems
> 
> On 2017-08-28 15:06+0200 Ole Streicher wrote:
> 
> > [...] since Qt4 is going to be deprecated very soon in Debian [1]
> 
> [...]
> > [1]
> > https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2017/08/msg00006.html
> 
> By the way, thanks very much for that link.  I had no idea that upstream Qt4
> maintenance had completely shut down so that the demise of downstream
> Qt4 on most Linux distributions is inevitable and likely soon even for non-
> Debian distributions.  Let's just hope this focus of the upstream Qt
> developers on Qt5 will soon make that suite of libraries as reliable as the Qt4
> suite of libraries is now.
> 

For Mac-related reasons we have been using Qt5 for some time now for our QSAS software, which as you know uses plplot as its graphics engine. Actually, we use our own qt driver rather than the official plplot versions for reasons I don't know but probably related to the way we bind it into our code and/or the way users have to interact with the plots. But we've kept the plplot core reasonably up-to-date.

Our big issue with Qt5 is the placement of characters/symbols on the plot page which is rarely at exactly the right vertical location and varies from one output device to the next. I think that was one of the main issues which led you to revert to Qt4. Perhaps there are others.

Do you have any updates (or optimism) on this issue?

Best wishes
Steve