Re: Offscreen plotting in OpenGL

[Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso]

2011/8/11 John W. Eaton <address@hidden>:
> On 11-Aug-2011, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso wrote:
>
> | So there's one outstanding wishlist item for making the OpenGL
> | backend default for 3.6, and that's offscreen plotting.
> |
> | I asked around, and apparently it's now easier to do this than it
> | was 3 years ago, and framebuffer objects are the way to go. It
> | doesn't sound terribly complicated from my initial perusal of the
> | subject. Should we "officially" (whatever that means) add this to
> | the 3.6 release goals?
>
> It's definitely needed.
>
> Does this have anything to do with printing? As I recall, printing
> also requires a display? Does that make printing somehow tied to
> screen (or framebuffer) resolution?

AIUI, no, it doesn't require a display (I don't know if it requires a
running X server anyways), and whatever it is that works for gl2ps can
also take a framebuffer object. What's a high-level explanation of
what gl2ps does? It's been a while since I've touched the OpenGL code.

As an aside, I showed a Windows user the fltk interface yesterday in
IRC for Tatsuro's 3.4.2 binary, and he said he was "very impressed".
This, with the profiler, and an "experimental" GUI (say, disabled by
default, so as to not have a buggy GUI soil our reputation), could
make some very interesting user-visible improvements for 3.6.

- Jordi G. H.