On Wednesday, 10 December 2014 04:15:23 PM Philipp K. Janert wrote:
>
> One more thing: set linetype cycle applies only
> to line properties (color and width), but not to
> point properties. That's too bad.
>
> Let's say I only want to use two symbols (filled
> and empty circles, say). Then I can't use the
> "set linetype" facility to achieve this - I need
> to set the pointtype (or linestyle) explicitly
> for each data set in my plot command, right?
>
> At this point I wonder how useful "set linetype cycle"
> really is. Is there a deep reason to limit its
> effect to line properties only?
Yes.
I showed you one such reason a couple of weeks back.
If you pick linetype and pointtype cycles that are
relative primes, then the number of distinguishable
plots "with linespoints" is equal to their product.
For instance I can use a single plot command to quickly
screen the response curves from a 96-well experiment.
To distinguish the "hits" from the "noise", I need at
least 96 distinct curve types. By default there are
15 point types and 9 line types. That's not good for
this use, because those numbers are not relatively prime.
They only yield 45 distinct line+point combinations.
But if I either lower the linetype cycle to 7 or
raise it to 11 I get 7*15=105 or 11*15=165 distinct
curve types.
Adding "set pointtype cycle N" and "set dashtype cycle N"
are on the TODO list, but the details of of how these
would interact with each other are not fully worked out.
I've put a patch on SourceForge for testing if you
would like to try it. It's #708
Ethan
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