Unicode-based scientific plotting for working in the terminal

Re:Unicode-based scientific plotting for working in the term... by sprash on Saturday June 06, 2020 @07:09AM (#23438350)

I recently found out that XTerm supports sixels natively if started with the "-ti 340" option. For example gnuplot can make use of that feature using the command "set terminal sixlegd".

It turns out because of the way sixels are encoded (six vertical pixels in a row using bitplanes) it packs better than png when used in conjunction with the bzip2 packer. Every image can simply be encoded to sixel with imagemagick using "convert image.png sixel:- > image.six"

Personally I think sixels are genius should be used much more often.

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Re:Unicode-based scientific plotting for working in the term... by brutt on Saturday June 06, 2020 @10:36AM (#23439464)

Sixels will be added to libvte (gnome-terminal): https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/vte/-/issues/254

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Re:Unicode-based scientific plotting for working in the term... by iso-8859-1 on Saturday June 06, 2020 @04:15PM (#23441916)

Great news! I think we may finally see a resurgence. It will be well supported on mainstream Linux, and given that the web is getting so heavy-weight, this will offer a solid alternative for graphics that you can rely on. Libvte is very popular.

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Re:Unicode-based scientific plotting for working in the term... by petepete on Saturday June 06, 2020 @07:18AM (#23438388)

GNUPlot and XTerm also support Tektronix, there's lots of info in this older discussion.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7776904

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Re:Unicode-based scientific plotting for working in the term... by mongol on Saturday June 06, 2020 @07:24AM (#23438406)

The Kitty terminal author also published a "terminal graphics protocol". I don't know what other terminal supports it, however.

https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/graphics-protocol.html

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Re:Unicode-based scientific plotting for working in the term... by dTal on Saturday June 06, 2020 @09:26AM (#23439024)

>it packs better than png when used in conjunction with the bzip2 packer.

Cute! But is it fair? I don't think it's lossless - the color depth is much reduced.

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Re:Unicode-based scientific plotting for working in the term... by sprash on Saturday June 06, 2020 @10:29AM (#23439422)

I took the reduced color depth into consideration. However on second glance it seems like Imagemagick does not compress PNG very efficiently with default settings. After recompressing with zopflipng PNG was easily able to beat bzip2 packed sixels. Results for 256 color 512x512 Lenna:

Sixel + bzip2: 245K

PNG Imagemagick: 467K

PNG Zopfli 10 Iterations: 188K

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Re:Unicode-based scientific plotting for working in the term... by iso-8859-1 on Saturday June 06, 2020 @04:13PM (#23441903)

I used your ImageMagick command, but the resulting image is very bright and almost invisible. I tried disabling Unicode using +u8, but that didn't work. I tried mlterm, that worked.

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Re:Unicode-based scientific plotting for working in the term... by sprash on Sunday June 07, 2020 @01:48PM (#23449135)

I forgot to tell that you have to enable 256 colors as well. Put this into your .Xresources:

    XTerm.*.decTerminalID: vt340
    XTerm.*.numColorRegisters: 256

And refresh with

    xrdb -merge $HOME/.Xresources

It should work now.

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Re:Unicode-based scientific plotting for working in the term... by leephillips on Saturday June 06, 2020 @11:37AM (#23439882)

That should be "sixelgd", of course. And there is the classic "dumb" terminal, that plots to any text terminal, optionally using ansi escape codes for color.

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