I think it is worth having a plot/pict or pict/plot library that doesn't depend on racket/GUI/base (or maybe it would be better to disentangle snips). In any case, we have many others such libraries that turn on avoiding racket/gui/base for exactly this reason. <div> </div><div>Robby On Tuesday, October 8, 2013, Neil Toronto wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">On 10/08/2013 11:22 AM, Stephen Chang wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"> Short question: Is there a way to separate the gui-requiring parts of plot from the non-gui-requiring parts? Long question: Many people have expressed pleasant surprise with the plot-evaluating ability of the racket pastebin Sam and I are working on. Most of the effort is due to scribble's nice sandbox evaluation capabilities but to get it fully working, I had to hack the plot library in my racket install. The problem is that plot uses racket/gui/base too eagerly but the server has no display, resulting in a gtk initialization error. I ultimately got around it by just commenting out all the gui parts of plot, knowing that it would never get invoked, but obviously this is an ugly solution. I should say that I don't think plot is at fault. The plot library does lazy-require racket/gui/base but that's not good enough because the laziness has to propagate to other requires that also require racket/gui/base (ie plot/snip) which isnt the case. But this cannot work anyways because lazy-require only works with functions and some of the things imported by plot/snip are classes. I spent awhile trying to separate the gui-requiring parts of plot but was unsuccessful. Maybe the change has to be in racket/gui/base itself (related to PR 12465) I don't really know. I guess I'm just looking for additional insight. Naively, slideshow/pict and 2htdp/draw do not have this problem so it seemed like it should be possible. </blockquote> Right, racket/gui/base is necessary for snips. In all the documentation that uses plots (plot, math, images) I've used the following hack when setting up the evaluators: (eval '(require (rename-in (except-in plot plot plot3d) [plot-pict plot] [plot3d-pict plot3d]))) You could also rename `plot-bitmap' and `plot3d-bitmap'. (The docs use picts because they look better rendered in a PDF.) It wouldn't be hard to make a module that does that and provides everything. (Except possibly `plot-snip', `plot-frame', etc.) I'm reluctant to single out one way of rendering when the GUI isn't available. Picts look nicer when scaled, but bitmaps look nicer when unscaled (plots are subpixel-rendered in this case). Picts take much more time to redraw, but for bitmaps it's just a blit. Neil ⊥ _________________________ Racket Developers list: <a href="http://lists.racket-lang.org/dev" target="_blank">http://lists.racket-lang.org/dev</a> </blockquote></div>