Re: Suggestions needed for a new command

[Ethan M. <merritt@u.washington.edu>]

On Thursday 29 September 2005 12:57 pm, Harald Harders wrote:
> On Thu, 29 Sep 2005, Ethan Merritt wrote:
> 
> > On Thursday 29 September 2005 03:00 am, Robert Hart wrote:
> >
> > > Something like:
> > >
> > > set plotstyle axes
> > > set plotstyle bordered

> I would prefer 'set style plot' because it really would open the way to
> different layouts, as shown in the attachment. The DIN variant 2 is
> strange but defined in the standard. I normally use DIN variant 1 which is
> hard to get using current gnuplot because you always have to adapt the
> position by hand.

You have convinced me. Wow, I had no idea that DIN extended to telling
people how to make their plots. Of the two, I like "set plotstyle" better
than "set style plot".

So the proposal so far is for a command with options

	set style plotlayout {bordered|axes|DIN1|DIN2|...}

The default would be "set plotstyle bordered", which is what we have now.

We could also consider allowing some suboptions to further tune the overall
appearance. I have been keeping a list of requested features that
would be easy to implement but have no obvious place to be specified
in the current command set: 
	{no}colorkeytitles
	{linespacing <n>}
	{background <rgbcolor>}

 
> Another thing I have always planned but not programmed is to provide the
> position of an axis:
> 
> set xzeroaxis at 3.5 # in 2D
> set xzeroaxis at 3.5,4.2 # in 3D
> 
> This would enable users to use zeroaxis also for plots that have a range
> which does not include zero and for log-scale plots.

I like that suggestion also, particularly if it means we can
deprecate "set ticslevel", which no one can ever remember.

-- 
Ethan A Merritt       merritt@u.washington.edu
Biomolecular Structure Center
Mailstop 357742
University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195