Re: Cannot draw figures in Mac OS X

[Joe Koski]

on 2/20/04 10:26 AM, Henry F. Mollet at address@hidden wrote:

> On 2/19/04 6:33 AM, "A S Hodel" <address@hidden> wrote:
>> 
>> I've been using octave on a mac for 6 years or more now.
>> I'm currently running Octave on both G3 and G4 machines, some
>> running Jaguar (10.2.x) and one running Panther (10.3.x).
>> The basic machine configurations are:
>> 
>> Jaguar:
>> - fink install of octave, Xfree-86, gnuplot, and Aquaterm
>> 
>> Panther:
>> - Apple X11
>> - fink install of octave, gnuplot, and Aquaterm -or-
>> - CVS install of octave (requires a couple tweaks),
>>   fink install of gnuplot and aquaterm.
>> 
>> I'm able to use both Aquaterm and gnuplot on both OS's; my
>> preference (due habits acquired due to using octave to mac OS X ) is
>> gnuplot.
>> 
>> I've not tried to install octave without gnuplot/X11.  That may be a
>> part
>> of the problem (others will have to speak to that).
> 
> Thanks. As much as I try, I always seem to be about 10 steps behind. Several
> people pointed out that AquaTerm allows easy save as pdf or eps, whereas
> this is more difficult in X11 (and probably Xfree-86?). I find this to be
> very useful, because I can then use the saved pdf in a powerpoint and I
> believe an eps will make it a lot easier if I later want to include a graph
> for publication in a scientific journal. I can also have as many AquaTerm
> windows as I wish, be it with "gset term aqua n" at the octave prompt or
> within a script.
> 
> My question is what could I do with X11 or Xfree-86 (similar to X11) that I
> cannot presently do with *octave* running in my terminal window using the
> tcsh shell and using *AquaTerem via gnuplot called by octave* for my graphs.
> What are the advantages of X11? So far I've only heard that it is more
> difficult to print a pdf in X11.
> Henry
> 
Just one quick observation on graphics, not necessarily on X11, although
that's how I started to use octave before discovering Aquaterm by accident.

If you use Adobe Illustrator to edit your graphics for publication, it is
handy to "gset term aifm" or "gset term aifm color" and do a "replot" into a
.ai extension to save the graph into Adobe Illustrator format. If you bring
an Aquaterm .pdf into Illustator, it won't "ungroup" to allow modifications.
For example, you may want to change the title, annotate, or eliminate "Line
1 ------" from the plot. My Illustrator 10 won't let me ungroup the
Aquaterm-saved .pdf image, but the aifm format image ungroups easily for
modifications. 

Incidentally, I learned about the aifm format while trying to find a way to
save plots to file before I discovered aquaterm. Is that be an advantage for
octave with X11?


Joe Koski



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