#2015 SVG hypertext only works on edges of hollow points; can we get it on the (transparent) fill too?

[Anonymous]

gnuplot 5.2 patch 2 on Debian unstable, rendering to SVG with Mozilla Firefox 57

The tooltips for "with labels hypertext point" and pointtypes that have only borders, no fills, only show when the mouse is over the border. of the point. (Filled points do not exhibit this problem: the entire area of the point works to hover and show tooltips.)

This makes these next to unusable for hypertext points. This is problematic when taking the point types from index numbers or other sources. I do this to generate variation and hence promote identification among large numbers of series. I suppose I can manually filter my types only to the solid ones, but I feel like I shouldn't have to, and doing so will reduce the amount of differentiation I can get between series (I plot many series, using colour and points to ease discernment among them)

This is presumably because the SVG renderer only applies the mouseover tooltip to the border for these 'hollow' points. Could it be possible, in these cases, to additionally generate a transparent fill and have the hypertext hover work on that too? At least in the "hypertext point" case; I think it makes sense that users would, like me, expect the whole point to be usable, not just its edges.

Minimal reproducer, which simply points pointtypes 1~10: run this and hover over them, and you'll see what I mean.

test.txt:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

test.gp:

set terminal svg mousing size 640,480;
set output "test.svg"

plot for [c = 1:10] "test.txt" \
    using c:c:("can you see me?") \
    with labels \
    notitle \
    hypertext point \
    pointsize 4 \
    pointtype c;

[Ethan Merritt]

Can't you just do that yourself in the plot command? See for example the on-line demo
http://gnuplot.sourceforge.net/demo_svg_cvs/hypertext.html

[Daniel Boles]

(sorry, forgot to log in before)

Yeah, I could plot 2 series: one for the shapes I want to show - then another, transparent set of solid points to serve as the mouseover areas. I was just wondering if it'd make sense not to require this extra work, i.e. to automatically overlay a transparent area or in some other way make the full area of the drawn point a hover target.

Anyway, while I figured I'd mention this, I know it's trifling, probably a niche concern, and I would guess will not be seen as worth complicating the drawing logic for.

For now, I've changed to cycle through points 5~15 in increments of 2, which yields all the solid point types, and probably looks nicer and easier to read anyway. :)