1.4.6 New or revised terminal drivers

Two new drivers based on the cairo and pango libraries are included, ‘pngcairo‘ and ‘pdfcairo‘. These are alternatives to the older libgd-based png driver and the older PDFLib-based pdf driver. The figures in the pdf version of this manual were prepared using the pdfcairo terminal driver.

The ‘canvas‘ terminal driver produces javascript output that draws onto the HTML canvas element of a web page. It can produce either a complete web page containing a single plot, or a script that can be embedded as part of an externally generated HTML document that perhaps contains multiple plots. The embedded plots support browser-side mousing, including zoom/unzoom.

The ‘lua‘ terminal driver creates an data intended to be further processed by a script in the lua programming language. At this point only one such lua script, gnuplot-tikz.lua, is available. It produces a TeX document suitable for use with the latex TikZ package. Other lua scripts could be written to process the gnuplot output for use with other TeX packages, or with other non-TeX tools.

‘Set term tikz‘ is shorthand for ‘set term lua tikz‘. As decribed above, it uses the generic lua terminal and an external lua script to produce a latex document.