Re: Drop support for some print formats

[Alois Schlögl]

On 09.11.18 17:34, Pantxo Diribarne wrote:
> Hi,
>
> We claim to support many graphics formats (mainly through the use of
> ghostscript and pstoedit) but I am not actually able to test most of them:
> some are completely obsolete (hpgl, metafont), others are proprietary (ai,
> cdr). So I'd like to remove support for many of those formats and let users
> make use of external conversion tools if they want them.
>
> I'd like to remove at least those:
> * ill, aifm: Adobe Illustrator natively supports importing SVG files.
> * cdr, corel: CorelDraw natively supports importing SVG files.

That might be true, but the fidelity of the conversion sucks and is not
as good as with "-meta".

If I recall correctely, this concerns often the  grouping of elements,
which is important when changing fonts, rotating labelling, etc.

Often, the import through svg results in a mess, while import through
-meta provides much better results.


> * hpgl: Who uses plotters nowadays?
> * metafont: This one I don't even imagine how to use it.

I guess you mean

   print -meta fig1.emf

Any vector graphics software on windows can deal with it.


> * cgm, dxf: Mainly intended for technical drawing, not scientific data
> representation
>
> Do you have comments? Devices you would like to keep/remove?
>
> Pantxo
>

We (me and colleages) are actually using "-meta", for a toolchain like

- octave/linux: used for computations producing results and figures:

- coraldraw/windows: for the finishing the figures for publication (free
options like Inscape, libreoffice/draw) are still not accepted by my
co-workers.


We tried several alternative vector graphichs formats including 

"-cdr" (we a glad that this option was available, but it was not good, 

"-svg", "-ai" (not used be of corel), the easiest toolchain was with
"-meta".


Another remark: most often I still use the the gnuplot graphics_toolkit
as other graphics toolkits (fltk, qt) still show problems (e.g. 3d plot
like mesh, when exporting). 


If you have suggestions for other toolchains, I'm happy to test, but for
the moment "-meta" is an essential feature of octave.


Alois