Re: Suggestions needed for a new command

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

On Thursday 29 September 2005 03:20 pm, Harald Harders wrote:
> 
> The valid suboptions have to be dependent on the chosen plotlayout.
> For  example, the DIN layouts need offsets, lengths, and styles for the arrows,
> while a background seems unlogical for plots without a border.

You might want a colored background for the XY plane in a 3D with 
xzeroaxis and yzeroaxis active, particularly if you are also drawing a
curve of some sort onto that plane.  And it is exactly in the case where
there is no border that you would want this the most. Right now you can
turn on the x and y grid lines, which is OK, but if we support backgrounds
at all it would be logical to support it for this purpose also.

But let's defer this until after the basic framework is in place.
 
> The question now is if different plotlayouts should use different routines
> to parse the command line or if it should be one routine which tests for
> every used option if it is valid for this layout (as for example the
> postscript-based terminals do).

If there is little overlap in the legal choice of suboptions, it's probably
better to let each style have its own parser.  In any case, duplicate code
can be merged later.
 
> Now, the question is who programmes what. I volunteer to programme the
> DIN 1 style. I think we should just leave out DIN 2 since it really is a
> strange thing to replace the last but one tic on an axis by its unit.

How about if you write both a type level parsing routine for
	set style plot$layout {border|axes|DIN|<others to be determined later}
and a specific parsing and initialization routine for the "DIN" case.
I'll provide a routine for the "axes" case, and either a suboption or a 
parallel one that handles your example of arrowheads on the axes.

"set style plot bordered" is simple, since it just resets to the current set
of default properties. But I guess we have to agree on exactly what properties
are being affected by these style settings, so we know what to reset.
I think the list so far is
	{xyz}zeroaxis
	{xyz}tics {axis|border}
	border
	arrowstyle for axes   # doesn't currently exist
Possibly also
	default key placement
	offsets for {xyz}label

Does the DIN style specification say anything about 3D plots?

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