#407 pepwheel's options
Various suggestions from mailing lists:
> It would be nice if the start position was marked. For any path that
> closes on itself
> (as with 7,2 or 18,5) there is no open end to the trace to indicate this.
Good idea.
> Also, from reading the documentation one might expect 7,2 to give the
> same plot
> as 70,20 or 14,4, but those are all different.
Ah ... good point. It loops over the first step before creeping outwards
and trusts the user to use a step and turn that returns to the start
only when the step is complete.
> Personally, I think the program would be easier to understand and
> control if it used these numbers
> instead of turn/steps:
>
> 1. angle step per residue in degrees (a float, default 100.0)
> 2. starting radius (float, arbitrary units, default 1.0)
> 3a. letter radius increment per residue (a float,default ?)
> or
> 3b. letter increment after residue N (default 18, based on geometry from
> 1,2)
Good suggestion.
We are generally reluctant to change the command line qualifiers, but
for the next release we already have a couple of minor cleanups to
prettyplot's options (plurality and output in blocks) so we can avoid
dependencies that made them impossible to define in Galaxy.
I prefer 3b - spiralling out gives the wrong impression, printing
outside is only needed to avoid overlaps. We can automatically work out
where one letter would overlap with another and find where to increment
the radius (the step size).
Letters and symbols could also be scaled to fit the number of steps with
an option to shrink them.
We will update pepwheel's options for the next release.
Discussion
