Hans Hagen wrote:
gnuplot is great indeed, but the output is rather large; it would be nice if there was a real good output mode (say, comparable to the output produced by metapost: compact, parsable);
LaTeX mode IS parsable and I often edit it manually (except the part which does the smooth plotting of functions with lines; smooth lines are composed from hundreds of points and that part makes the files huge). Drawing only the points results in a reasonably small file.
btw, is it really that difficult to use gnuplot output in context?
No. A file context.trm (http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/gnuplot/gnuplot/term/) should be written by modifiying the postscript/metapost/latex.trm and perhaps some layer should be added in ConTeXt for \startgnuplot ... \stopgnuplot. Metapost can already be used, perhaps only some interaction with ConTeXt is missing (setting point shapes & colors, fonts, ... somewhere at the beginning or in a separate style file). To answer Christophers's and Alexander's question about quality of metapost output: I guess I mixed it up with pslatex when I was talking about the output quality. You can't express it in percentage. See http://pub.mojca.org/tex/gnuplot/trlin.pdf for an example graph with latex/pslatex/mp as rendering terminal. The second example could be easily manually tuned a bit afterwards. Linewidths & typesetting in general is a bit worse (from my point of view), but there's no such quality loss as if you use PNGs. Mojca