Octave-2.9.x, Macs and AquaTerm

[Joe Koski]

Hi all,

After several exchanges with the AquaTerm developer, Per Persson, I think
that I have determined the current status regarding the use of AquaTerm in
place of X11 with octave-2.9.x on a Mac. The good news is that AquaTerm
continues to work without problems, but all plot windows are labelled
"Figure 0" regardless of what number is fed to figure.m. If there are just a
few plots, this isn't a problem. For long sequences of plots, this becomes
very confusing. The X11 interface on a Mac also continues to work without
problems, and does show the correct figure number.

First, many Linux/PC users are probably wondering what's the big deal? The
advantages to Mac users of octave/gnuplot/AquaTerm over the last couple of
years have been: 1) We don't need to start X11 to run octave, 2) Whenever an
interesting plot appears, AquaTerm can save it as either .eps or .pdf
without a replot or print, and 3) we can use our native Mac fonts (which are
not X11 fonts), so all our graphics have a common "look and feel." The only
disadvantage that I know about is that we can't zoom in on a portion of the
plot with the cursor as you can with X11.

The underlying problem is that of all the gnuplot terminals, only X11 has
the ability to pass command line arguments, figure number in this case, to
the plot. All other terminals, including AquaTerm, do not have this feature.
Per says that a new gnuplot version is due in the near future, but it will
not have the argument passing feature for other terminals either. He said
the next new version of gnuplot (now on the drawing boards) with have an
inquiry feature that will permit querying the status while in gnuplot, and
the query results should include a listing of the command line arguments for
parsing. That is probably a year or two away at this point.

For the short term, I am willing to try cobbling together some files that I
can keep in my local directories that gives me back the full functionality
of AquaTerm. I need to find the place to sneak in the line
__gnuplot_set__(sprintf("term aqua %d title %s fname %s fsize %d\n", f,
figure_title,fontname,fontsize)); or something like it, in a place that
doesn't interfere with the new plot or print approach in octave. Suggestions
from the developers will be appreciated. For example, where is the best
place to put the set term line: __setup_plot__.m, __plt__.m, figure.m?

Once I have it working, I'll share what is needed via this list and the
wiki.

Are there any comments? Suggestions? Thanks.

Joe