Re: gnuplot graphics toolkit bugs

[Daniel J Sebald]

On 06/24/2015 10:11 PM, Tatsuro MATSUOKA wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----

[snip]

> However, I surprised when I found the description:
> "* Mouse double-click to export terminal coordinates to the X11
> clipboard no longer works reliably, and may be deprecated in the future."
>
> I do not know reason why "Mouse double-click to export terminal coordinates
> to the X11 clipboard no longer works" happened
> but surprised that the statements "(it) may be deprecated in the future."
> The developers selected not to fix the issue but to kill the feature.
> The important feature will be lost from X11 terminal.

Yes, I hadn't seen that before either.  I think there was frustration 
with getting X11 copy/paste to work with a clipboard manager, something 
I rarely use (where I use the usual X11 copy/paste types of things all 
the time).  X11 is a little strange in that no data is requested of the 
copy source until the paste operation takes place.  There is some 
handshaking to figure out what data format the destination accepts and 
the source provides--then the data is transferred.  It's not easy to 
program.


> As you know, configure in gnuplot 5, automatically enables qt terminal
> if qt development environments are available.
> In addition, qt terminal is selected as a default terminal without any
> external setting like "export GNUTERM=wxt".
> (On gnuplot 4, to enable qt, one should set option --with-qt at configure.)
>
>
> This behavior can be understand from the description:
>
> Part of RELEASE NOTES
>
> NOTES TO PACKAGERS AND TESTERS
> <snipped unrelated information>
>
>   Configuration options for interactive use
>         1. Qt The qt terminal supports interactive display with menu-driven 
> output to png, svg or pdf. If either Qt4 or Qt5 is detected by the configure 
> script, this will be the default terminal. It is now the fastest and most 
> full-featured interactive terminal option.
> To disable this terminal:
> ./configure --without-qt
> To force use of Qt4 even if Qt5 is present:
> ./configure --with-qt=qt4
>         2. Cairo/pango/wxWidgets This set of terminals includes
>         * pngcairo, pdfcairo, epscairo, and cairolatex for output to a file
>         * wxt for interactive display All of these will be built by default if 
> the configuration script finds the required libcairo, libpango, libcairo, 
> libwxgtk, and related support libraries To disable these terminals:
> ./configure --without-cairo ./configure --with-cairo --disable-wxt
>         3. X11 (the "classic" interactive interface)
> This used to be the preferred interactive interface, but the newer wxt and qt 
> terminals offer nicer output and a wider range of features.
> They clearly states that

All true...

>    It is now the fastest and most full-featured interactive terminal option. 
> (for qt)

except the speed.  Perhaps there is some hardware in which Qt can use, 
say, OpenGL directly, but on my system that isn't the case.  Qt terminal 
is drastically slower.


> I am using gnuplot mainly on windows and sometimes use it on Ubuntu.
> I select wxt terminal as a default terminal using startup file setting on both 
> windows and Ubuntu.
> Because it works both platforms. I do not select qt terminal because there 
> sometimes reported bug fixes
> for qt terminal in the ChangeLog of development branch (Now 5.1).

Actually, qt terminal did a leap frog on wxt as far as the features. 
But recently some more copy/past/print code was added to wxt so both 
behave in a very similar way.


>   I some times provide windows binaries on gnuplot release. (e.g 4.6.6, 64 bit 
> version of 5.0.0 and 5.0.1)
> On window binaries for gnuplot ver. 5, qt terminal is available but not a 
> default.
> The default terminal is wxt.

Yes, appreciate it, thanks.  Wxt is good.

Dan