Re: various observations

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

On Tuesday 09 May 2006 05:56 pm, Daniel J Sebald wrote:
> 
> 1)  Is the CVS synched with what developers have checked in?

No. 6 weeks out of date and a lot of water under the bridge.

> If so, there is still a problem with arrow style parsing

No. Fixed (6-delta) weeks ago.

> 2)  3D plot layout is definitely the thing most in need of work post 4.2.
> The default colorbox seems too big and out of place.

So change it. You don't have to use the default if you don't like it.

> The x-y plane position seems slightly limited.  

Works fine for me.

> The axes would remain the same and the x-y plane would extend off the plot, 
> which just seemed silly.     

???
I don't understand.  You set the intersection of the plane with
the Z axis at -0.2, and that's where it is drawn.  What did you expect?

> Then "set xyplane at -0.2" and setting the z-value of the points to -0.2 
> puts the points and x-y plane in the same plane, but notice that the 
> line of the z-axis still extends down to where the xyplane used to be.
> (That's a bug, isn't it?  Or am I missing something?)

Um. I don't know. For me the z-axis extends to span the range
currently set by "set zrange".  That has nothing in particular
to do with where the xyplane is currently set.


> 3)  It sure is annoying going through the trouble of looking up 
> in "test" (x11) the number of the symbol desired, 
> and then the symbol comes out differently in the output file (png).

User error.  
If you want to know what the png symbols look like, 
test them with the png driver.

> Regardless of the different symbols from one output terminal to another, 
> I find it so confusing, because looking at "test" as a PNG output the "7" 
> is actually a solid symbol, but not in this example (see attached "normal.png").

That's just because of the limited resolution.
I don't think we can do anything about that.

> Also, is it OK to use "linecolor rgb "black" to control symbol color as I did?
Sure, if you want.  Or "lt -1".

> 4)  In a related category would be contours.  
> I wanted to force the contours to be all of the same color, in this case black.  
> That doesn't seem possible.  

Yes it is. You just have to specify a specific color (lc rgb "blue")
rather than a linetype.  If you give a linetype, it autoincrements
as it draws each contour.

> 5)  In the example, I really only want about 25 samples.  
> IS THERE SOME WAY TO CONTROL THIS?

set isosamples 25, 25

> 6)  Would anyone object to a patch for a math function "randn()" 
> generating unit variance normal distribution random values using 
> the Box-Mueller method?  

Other than generating demo plots, is there really a need?


-- 
Ethan A Merritt
Biomolecular Structure Center
University of Washington, Seattle WA