Re: fltk printing

[Søren Hauberg]

tir, 20 07 2010 kl. 15:51 -0500, skrev Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso:
> Try this:
> 
>      backend("fltk");
>      x = linspace(0,2*pi,100);
>      [xx,yy] = meshgrid(x,x);
>      surf(xx,yy, sin(xx.*yy));
>      tic, print foo.eps, toc
> 
> On my system, I got: "Elapsed time is 17.4619 seconds" and it eats CPU
> for that time. The resulting EPS is about 18 megs. I also tried it
> with "shading interp" before the print call, and it was taking an even
> longer amount of time, and my machine froze completely, forcing a hard
> reset. :-(

Yeah, 'gl2ps' is great for 2D stuff, but it is slow and produces huge
files for 3D stuff. I'm not sure how much can be done to avoid this
issue.

Since we need to have a local copy of 'gl2ps' in the source tree, it
might be sensible to patch it to include an 'OCTAVE_QUIT' somewhere,
such that printing operations at least can be stopped pressing Ctrl-C.

> Can we do this instead?
> 
>      http://www.opengl.org/resources/faq/technical/miscellaneous.htm#misc0050
> 
> It would incur some image library dependencies, but I don't think it's
> unreasonable, as those libraries are probably needed anyways for
> gnuplot or the widely used image 'Forge package. I'm working right now
> on the things related to the recent 3d rotation patches, but I'd be
> quite happy to write patches to plot images this way.

As Shai mentioned this is not without issues. Regarding depending on
external libraries then we already depend on GraphicsMagick which could
easily be used here. So this approach would not introduce further
dependencies.

Soren