Re: Suggestions needed for a new command

[Robert H. <en...@no...>]

On Wed, 28 Sep 2005, Ethan Merritt wrote:

> There are two problems with the "set ticslevel" command.
> 1) It isn't easy to do in a script, since you don't necessarily
> know in advance what are the values of YMIN and YMAX
> 2) It breaks anyhow if you later change zrange.

I suppose the ticslevel command could be "adapted" to take absolute
coordinates. Something like:

set ticslevel relative 0.5  # works as before
set ticslevel absolute 0    # is a z-value for the XY-plane

The relative keyword would of course be optional. "absolute" could be
"zvalue" or simply "z", and "zmin" and "zmax" would be nice shortcuts for 
set ticslevel 0 and set ticslevel 1 (or is it -1?)

It does strike me that the name "ticslevel" is not the most descriptive of
what it does. I think I've had to look it up on more than one occasion and
always start with things like "offset" first.

> I want a new command that does the equivalent of the 8 commands above, 
> except that it bypasses the existing "set ticslevel" mechanism in
> favor of pinning the X/Y plane at Z=0.

you mean a single command that does all of the above? That seems like a
good idea, because that would seem to be a sequence of commands that would
frequently come together. Are there other examples? I guess the 2D
equivalent?

Something like:

set plotstyle axes
set plotstyle bordered

which could be expanded later to include other "popular" styles

set plotstyle excel

maybe?

> It's not clear to me whether this would fit in as a variant of 
> some existing command, or whether it would need a new one of its own.
> Possibilities include
> 
> 	set view axes

doesn't that conflict slightly with the existing use of "view"



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