[Octave-bug-tracker] [bug #48689] print to pdf shows black and yellow shaded regions not present on screen on macOS

[Dan Sebald]

Follow-up Comment #12, bug #48689 (project octave):

A couple comments about this specific example.

1) I don't know how recent your version of Octave is, but there's been an
attempt to bring back some functionality of gnuplot that was lost in 4.0.  The
approach in 4.0 was to print to an EPS file and then convert that result to
whatever the desired output format is.  That lost the wealth of gnuplot term
options, some of which make much nicer outputs than converting some bit
image.

2) Tessellation issues have come up several times now with the Mesa library,
and I think those are outside of Octave's control.  The only solution is to
get the latest version of Mesa and see if the issue has been solved.  I've
tried fixing some issues in one of the OpenGL drivers and posting to that
project's bug-report system.  Didn't get much traction though.  They seem to
be a small, insular community, but there is lots of traffic in terms of patch
sets so hopefully things get fixed.

A more general comment is that the closest one will get to WYSIWYG for gnuplot
is the Qt terminal and using its export functions.  Otherwise, gnuplot uses
lots of different drivers and libraries to create its terminals.  Good and
bad, I suppose.  The good aspect is the flexibility to create some format that
some user is historically used to using.  For example, I've always had an
interest in post-processing my figures using LaTeX so that I can have math
symbols/fonts/formulas matching the output of a LaTeX manuscript.  Manually
overlaying formulas in the manuscript itself is too tedious.  Writing the
formulas in Octave (even though it looks bad in other displays and prints) is
an OK compromise.  The reason gnuplot isn't WYSIWYG focused is because it
began years before that notion and things like Display PostScript which was
popularized by NeXT.  For gnuplot the model has been a "terminal" at the end
of some printer cable.

One last comment is that Apple is the least-well supported platform for
open-source projects, for whatever reason.  There aren't that many users
testing open-source software.  Variations in compilers, system libraries, etc.
complicate things and it usually takes a while to work the kinks out of Apple
builds.

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