From bug-octave-request at che dot utexas dot edu  Fri Nov 12 18:34:27 1993
Subject: problem with printing plots
From: chari at fireant dot ma dot utexas dot edu
To: bug-octave at che dot utexas dot edu, llave@tanya.ma.utexas.edu
Date: Fri, 12 Nov 93 10:41:52 CST


The following m-file is extremely unreliable and I don't see why. The
same sequence of commands works at the top level. This is a utility
function for students in one of our 427k classes that is supposed to
send the currently displayed plot to the printer.

  function printreplot
  set terminal postscript
  set output "| lpr -Plw8"
  replot
  set terminal x11
  endfunction

This exhibits varied behaviour. Sometimes...

     - it prints fine
     - it prints the previous plot and then the desired plot
     	  from a single invocation
     - it does nothing at all

Basically it is the same when done to a file instead of a pipe except
that you often get "lpr: plot.ps is empty".

This is on a Sun SPARCstation 10/51 running SunOS 4.1.3 and the
binaries are 0.77 taken from ftp.che.

Thanks.

Chris Whatley
UT-Austin Mathematics
Ph: 512/471-7711x199(O),499-0475(H)
E-mail: chari at {math,emx,cs} dot utexas dot edu,chari@gnu dot ai dot mit dot edu