Capturing Output of gnuplot Terminal without drawnow()

[Vote 539]

In this message from about a year ago, it was noted that alternative gnuplot terminals can be used by first calling a plot function followed by drawnow().

What I need is to tunnel Octave plots to SVG files.  The aforementioned approach works fine, but the procedure is twice as computationally intensive as displaying the plot in, for example, X11.  Consider the following commands:

octave> fplot(@(x) 1./x, [-2 2 -10 10])

octave> drawnow("svg", "plot.svg", false, "/dev/null")

This function is difficult to plot because of the vertical asymptote.  Octave tries plotting it in two separate occasions: once via fplot() and once via drawnow().  Computation time could be cut in half if Octave computed the plot only once.

I tried setting GNUTERM to `unknown`, but this did not speed up the fplot step.

Any ideas?