Nice plots for TeX in windows environments?

[Schirmacher, Rolf]

Hello,

I want to use octave/gnuplot plots for latex documents and as I have to work
on an win xp machine, the most convenient way is to use pdf(la)tex directly,
i.e. no dvi/ps/... postprocessing. pdf(la)tex supports pdf, png and jpeg
directly, but no ps, etc.

As I am thinking about high quality graphics, jpeg is not well suited for
plots (it is for photos, not for line drawings). pdf would be perfect, but
there seems to be no pdf terminal device / print support in the 2.9.13
binary distribution of octave. So, png is the only way to go (at least, if
you do not want to do any intermediate or post processing)

The default png output is 800x600 pixle which is fine for some on-screen
display  but is totally not sufficient for high quality plots. In addition
to (largely) increasing the resolution of the plot, something like adapting
the linewith and fontsize would be fine as all these quantities also seem to
be attributed in "pixel" and do not seem to have any idea of "resolution".

Is there any simple and direct method to convince octave/gnuplot to produce
a high resolution, pdf(la)texable plot without extra
re-formatting/postprocessing in a "standard" windows environment?

What is the current state of implementing some idea of physical size and
resolution to the plotting/printing frontend? To me, it looks like the only
"paper"-like property of a figure currently is the PaperOrientation, but
PaperType, PaperPosition, etc. are missing and print.m seems to have no idea
about "resolution".

Any help appreciated,

Rolf