[Gretl-users] boxplot(s) within a loop

[Allin Cottrell]

On Tue, 24 Feb 2009, Riccardo (Jack) Lucchetti wrote:

> On Tue, 24 Feb 2009, artur tarassow wrote:
>
> > Wow, it works fine now! ;)
> >  But, I think one little error remains. The option *.pdf does not produce any graphs.
> >
> > output:
> > <<<
> > ? gnuplot LHUR --with-lines --time-series --output=LHUR_fig.pdf
> >
> > set term pdf
> >          ^
> > "/home/artur/gretl/LHUR_fig.gp", line 1: unknown or ambiguous terminal type; type just 'set terminal' for a list
> > <<<
>
> Your copy of gnuplot does not support pdf output. This is quite
> common in linux-land, as most distros (eg Debian, Ubuntu) ship a
> precompiled version of gnuplot with pdf output disabled.
>
> I'm not sure what the best thing to do is. We have the following
> options:
>
> a) leave things as they are now, (ie let gnuplot fail) but issue
> a more informative statement
>
> b) remove the pdf option altogether, since we cannot be sure
> that it works
>
> c) do a run-time check (I don't like this)
>
> d) do a one-time check and store its results into the user's
> preferences somehow

Ah, I had forgotten that gnuplot might not support PDF output.
But in fact we already have a check for that (a one-time runtime
check, which is not elegant but, I think, better than disabling
PDF).  So I've now connected that check to the new functionality:
one should get an informative error message on trying to generate
PDF when gnuplot can't do it.

Allin.