lack of pdf support

Bug #162071 reported by Adam Greenhalgh
6
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
gnuplot (Debian)
Confirmed
Unknown
gnuplot (Ubuntu)
Won't Fix
Wishlist
Unassigned

Bug Description

Binary package hint: gnuplot

gnuplot 4.2 patchlevel 0 on gutsy lacks pdf terminal support.

Revision history for this message
In , Thimo Neubauer (thimo) wrote : Re: Bug#248426: set terminal pdf doesn't work

Hello,

On Tue, May 11, 2004 at 03:17:00PM +1000, Peter Chubb wrote:
> Package: gnuplot
> Version: 3.8k.1-1
>
> >From the documentation,
> set terminal pdf
> should enable PDF output.
>
> >From within Gnuplot,
> gnuplot> help set terminal pdf
> tells me that pdf output is supported.
>
> However,
>
> gnuplot> set terminal pdf
> ^
> unknown or ambiguous terminal type; type just 'set terminal' for a list

Unfortunately we can't include the PDF-terminal into the
gnuplot-packages because it uses the non-free PDFlib to plot. As a
workaround you could use the postscript-terminal and convert the
output with ps2pdf which is probably already installed on your system
(it's included in the GhostScript-package)

> And sure enough, just
>
> gnuplot> set terminal
>
> does not list PDF.

The situtation with the gif-terminal is similar: gnuplot supports the
output but due to license-restritions of the gif-format we can't
activate it...

About the documentation existing for a non-working terminal: "help set
terminal" warns about this:

 This document may describe drivers that are not available to you because they
 were not installed, or it may not describe all the drivers that are available
 to you, depending on its output format.

But I'll have a look into this, it seems that unconfigured terminals
could be excluded when the docs are automatically extracted from the
sources.

Cheers
   Thimo

Revision history for this message
In , Thimo Neubauer (thimo) wrote : really wishlist

severity 248426 wishlist
thanks

Revision history for this message
In , Thimo Neubauer (thimo) wrote : Re: Bug#248426: set terminal pdf doesn't work

Hi,

I've just entered a wishlist-bug into the upstream-BTS on sourceforge
(bug 963176)

  https://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=963176&group_id=2055&atid=102055

because I could not find an easy way to exclude the docs for unused
terminals. Let's see what happens :)

Cheers
    Thimo

Revision history for this message
In , a. Mennucc (mennucc1) wrote : epstopdf rather than ps2pdf

hi

Suppose , for example, that the user wants to insert a gnuplot plot into
LaTeX. In this case my recommended method is as follows:

In gnuplot, s/he issues
  set term post eps
  set out "plot.eps"
  plot ..the.plot.stuff.....
  set out

In LaTeX,

  \usepackage{graphicx}
  .......
  \begin{document}
  .....
  \includegraphics{plot}

The above will automatically include plot.eps if 'latex file.tex' is used,
and 'plot.pdf' if 'pdflatex file.tex'.

So, we need to convert 'plot.eps' to 'plot.pdf'.

In that case, I recommend not using 'ps2pdf' to convert the PS to PDF,
but rather 'epstopdf' (that is in package 'tetex-bin') ; the reason is
that (from the man page)
       epstopdf transforms the Encapsulated PostScript file epsfile so that it
       is guaranteed to start at the 0,0 coordinate, and it sets a page size
       exactly corresponding to the BoundingBox. This means that when
       Ghostscript renders it, the result needs no cropping, and the PDF Medi-
       aBox is correct.

ps2pdf does not set the bounding box in the PDF, that is,
'plot.pdf' will be as large as a standard A4 or letter page, with a
small plot in it; and the result 'pdflatex file.tex' will be quite weird,
because the figure generated by
    \includegraphics{plot}
will look like an empty page.

just my 2 cents

a.

Revision history for this message
Adam Greenhalgh (adam-hiddennet) wrote :

Binary package hint: gnuplot

gnuplot 4.2 patchlevel 0 on gutsy lacks pdf terminal support.

Revision history for this message
William Grant (wgrant) wrote :

See the Debian bug for the rationale.

Changed in gnuplot:
importance: Undecided → Wishlist
status: New → Won't Fix
Revision history for this message
Arun Thomas (arun-thomas) wrote :

You might consider building gnuplot 4.3 from source. It's in development, but it has pdf terminal support via cairo. The plots came out pretty well. Of course, you could also build pdflib and gnuplot 4.2 from source instead.

It's a shame pdflib is non-free. I guess we'll have to wait until gnuplot 4.3 makes its way into ubuntu to get pdf terminal support out of the box.

Changed in gnuplot:
status: Unknown → Confirmed
Revision history for this message
In , Eugen Dedu (eugen-dedu) wrote : epstopdf does not exist anymore in texlive

Hi,

I want to convert eps to pdf, but epstopdf does not exist in the current
debian TeX distribution (texlive). Do you know how to do it?

--
Eugen

Revision history for this message
In , Eugen Dedu (eugen-dedu) wrote :

Sorry, I have just seen that epstopdf is available in
texlive-extra-utils package.

===

Hi,

I want to convert eps to pdf, but epstopdf does not exist in the current
debian TeX distribution (texlive). Do you know how to do it?

--
Eugen

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