dumb terminal problems (re: Octave on Mac)

[Paul Kienzle]

On Jul 8, 2007, at 12:30 AM, address@hidden wrote:

> > Another thing is that octave.app has been prepared to work like you 
> > say, but just putting gnuplot into /Applications - don't know if this 
> > is all that has to be done for that gnuplot package. Try this from 
> > your Terminal.app
> >
> >   bash$ which gnuplot
> >
> > if it then says something like 'gnuplot not found' then you need to 
> > set up that package somehow different. *Maybe* something like an 
> > 'export PATH=$PATH:/<path to your gnuplot binary>' will help?!
>
> It seems the above will not help. The binary inside the package
> (gnuplot-version.app/Contents/MacOS/gnupolt-version) does not appear to
> be compiled to accept input from stdin. Rather, it launches a console
> interface to gnuplot. There is an included binary to pass scripts to 
> this
> app. I tried making this interface binary gnuplot, and calling
> plot(y) from Octave, but this only activated the program with the
> console and what appeared to be a blank editor page.
>
> I tried passing arguments to the binary inside the app, but that also
> was to no avail, just giving me the new console with a prompt waiting
> for input.


In the drawnow.m file 
(octave.app/Contents/Resources/share/octave/2.9.12/m/plot/drawnow.m) I 
see the following:

    if (nargin == 3)
      fprintf (plot_stream, "set terminal %s\n;", term);
      fprintf (plot_stream, "set output \"%s\"\n;", file);
    elseif (isunix () && isempty (getenv ("DISPLAY")))
      fprintf (plot_stream, "set terminal dumb\n;");
    elseif (! isempty (h) && strcmp (getenv ("GNUTERM"), "wxt"))
      fprintf (plot_stream, "set terminal wxt title \"Figure %d\";\n", 
h);
    endif

The problem goes away if I replace this with:

    if (nargin == 3)
      fprintf (plot_stream, "set terminal %s\n;", term);
      fprintf (plot_stream, "set output \"%s\"\n;", file);
    endif

It seems reasonable to me to let the native gnuplot decide what kind of 
default terminal it wants, along with documenting that ~/.gnuplot can 
have a "set term mydefaultterminal" command.

--

Knowing that 'set terminal dumb' is being done as the first command to 
plot stream, I figured that I would be able to reset the terminal to 
aqua after the first plot and have every thing work fine thereafter.  
Unfortunately this is not the case.  The sequence:

  plot(1:10);
  __gnuplot_raw__("set term aqua; plot sin(x)\n")
  plot(1:10);
  __gnuplot_raw__("plot atan(x)\n");

shows the plot types ascii, aqua, ascii then aqua again.  I have no 
idea what is going on.

        - Paul