Re: mplib

["Mojca Miklavec" <mojca.miklavec.lists@gmail.com>]

On Sat, Mar 15, 2008 at 11:18 AM, Hans Hagen wrote:
>
> Mojca Miklavec wrote:
>  > On Fri, Mar 14, 2008 at 6:51 PM, Aditya Mahajan wrote:
>  >> On Fri, 14 Mar 2008, Hans Hagen wrote:
>  >>
>  >>  > so, if you have specific wishes ... now is the time to let them know
>  >>
>  >>  Some questions (and hidden wishes)
>  >>
>  >>  Does this mean that text between metapost graphic and context can be
>  >>  really transparent? Currently \sometxt does not work with all macros,
>  >>  (like an old feature request by Mojca to have two optional arguments for
>  >>  setting the font in the gnuplot module). Will mplib mean that the metapost
>  >>  code can place any tex box at the desired location?
>  >
>  > Now that you mention it: I still need to adapt the gnuplot module to
>  > mkiv, but I'm a bit afraid of asking for help. (The most important
>  > thing would be to get rid of that stupid catcode trickery inside
>  > \startGNUPLOTscript ... \stopGNUPLOTscript that always tends to fail
>  > when one needs it, and to have one-to-one conversion, so that %,#, $,
>  > .... will have no special meaning.) Then, it would probably be a nice
>  > benchmark to discover bugs in the library :)
>  >
>  > For example, demos from this page (I'm not saying that they're too
>  > useful since 100x100 is too low resolution anyway):
>  >      http://gnuplot.sourceforge.net/demo_4.3/pm3d.html
>  > currently all fail because of the "out-of-memory" problem (10.000
>  > times "fill unitsquare scaled ... shifted ... withcolor ..."), but
>  > this might be a ConTeXt problem as well (the text inside
>  > \startMPgraphic ... \stopMPgraphic probably needs to be stored
>  > somewhere in TeX, even if there's no need for that).
>
>  let's discuss this a few months from now when i have more code in place
>
>  btw, how difficult would it be to add a lua api to gnuplot, in which
>  case we could communicate via lua tables

Peter Hedwig has already done some work on it:
    http://peter.affenbande.org/gnuplot/

What his patch does: one calls gnuplot normally, and then, when you say
   set term lua dashed fontsize 15
"dashed fontsize 15" is parsed by lua. Then, gnuplot does its work,
and calls functions:
   set_linestyle(3)
   set_color(...)
   draw_line(...)
What Peter did was a mapping from C to lua, so the actual code that
does "draw_line" is actually implemented in lua and can easily be
changed and/or adapted without recompiling gnuplot.

He now "converts" those function calls into TikZ Code, but that could
easily be adapted into anything.

So: output has already been implemented (and would "only" need to be
adapted), while input might need some tweaking. I'm sometimes using a
rather simple C++ library which opens gnuplot and pipes "set terminal
...", "plot ..." commands to gnuplot, so one can pass a C table to
gnuplot. I could take a look at how it's done there. How do you
imagine passing lua tables to gnuplot?

Mojca

PS: no need to say that even though his terminal is much more popular
(it's the only decent LaTeX terminal I know) than the one for ConTeXt,
I have seen zero discussion on the gnuplot mailing list about any
intentions to integrate that code into gnuplot core.
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