Why do we even need a "mono" option?

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

On Thursday 03 August 2006 11:41 am, Timoth=E9e Lecomte wrote:
> Daniel J Sebald wrote:
> >None of those other defaults are term properties.
>
> Implementing these options in the core seems reasonable, not that
> hard, and would save a lot of code duplication in the terminals.

Despite what Daniel said, these things *are* terminal properties.
The defaults cannot go into the core because they are different for
different terminals.

=46or example, I almost always use lw 2 for png and x11 output,
but lw 1 for PostScript.  Setting "dashed" for x11 produces=20
really ugly output, but it is perfectly reasonable for mono
PostScript.  =20

I have a question about these "mono" options.
If you send a color postscript or pdf to a mono printer, you
get a nice grayscale plot courtesy of PostScript itself.

Ghostscript offers the same flexibility:
  Usage: gv [OPTION]... [FILE]
  PostScript and PDF viewer.
    --monochrome    display document using only black and white
    --grayscale     display document without colors

Even MSword and PowerPoint offer the option to toggle=20
color/grayscale for individual imported images.

So why is it necessary to have two output modes from gnuplot?
In other words, why do we even have a "mono" option in
the first place?


=2D-=20
Ethan A Merritt
Biomolecular Structure Center
University of Washington, Seattle WA