using gnuplot dumb terminal

[Erik Butz <erik.butz@googlemail.com>]

Hi all,

thanks for this extremely versatile emacs mode. I am only beginning to
discover all the features available.

When using the org-plot/gnuplot interface, a possible use-case came to
my mind. In gnuplot one can have a primitive ascii dump of the plot,
using

set terminal dump

with or without an output file. I was wondering if it would be
possible to include the output of this as plot into an org document.

I can achieve basically this, by having something like

#+PLOT: set:"term dumb" file:"plot.plt"
|   a |   b |   c |
|-----+-----+-----|
| 200 | 100 | 300 |
| 200 | 200 | 400 |

#+TBLFM: $3=$1+$2

and then simply input 'plot.plt' into the document which looks
something like this in this case (don't know if the ascii art will
survive)

    400 ++------------+-------------+------------+-------------+---------$$$$$
        +             +             +            +             $$$$$a$****** +
        |                                            $$$$$$$$$$     b ###### |
    350 ++                                 $$$$$$$$$$               c $$$$$$++
        |                        $$$$$$$$$$                                  |
        |              $$$$$$$$$$                                            |
        |    $$$$$$$$$$                                                      |
    300 $$$$$                                                               ++
        |                                                                    |
        |                                                                    |
    250 ++                                                                  ++
        |                                                                    |
        |                                                                    |
    200 **********************************************************************
        |                                                      ##########    |
        |                                            ##########              |
        |                                  ##########                        |
    150 ++                       ##########                                 ++
        |              ##########                                            |
        +    ##########             +            +             +             +
    100 #####---------+-------------+------------+-------------+------------++
        0            0.2           0.4          0.6           0.8            1

More complicated things would then of course be to link the plot to
the table, and to be able to issue update commands if the table data
have changed etc.
Also when exporting to latex, one could simply change the mode of
gnuplot to eps/jpg and include the graphics in the exported document.

I have not found the 'dumb' mode mentioned anywhere in the forum, so I
was curious if anybody possibly thought about something like this (or
has done it already??), or had ideas on how to implement it (don't
know lisp myself, unfortunately).

Should this not be possible it is not really a problem, since there is
a way to do this as described above, but I found this a possibly nice
feature, as it would allow for simple plots while keeping the org
document to be overhead-free ascii.

Cheers and thanks,

Erik