Re: Suggestion to improve usability of plot command

[<br...@ph...>]

Keir Mierle wrote:
>> Keir Mierle wrote:
>>> I have a simple suggestion to improve the usability of the plot command.
>>> Currently, I am not a huge fan of the way point styles are specified; 

>> Not very surprisingly --- the syntax you use has never actually been 
>> documented, and has been deprecated for a *long* time now.  The current 
>> syntax, while still oriented towards numbers, is a lot clearer than

> This was not obvious to me in the documentation.  After digging around, I found
> an example of the new syntax hidden in the variable point size demo in the
> gnuplot 4.2 examples.

Interesting.  I really wonder how you managed to miss 'help plot with'.

> Now, having said that, let's take this from a new users (my) perspective. All
> I want to accomplish is to control the scatter plot symbols.
> 
>    1) I go to gnuplot.info. I click on the obvious Documentation link (good).

Bad first reflex.  Why is it so many people these days seems to assume 
that the obvious first place to search for documentation of some tool is 
the web?

>    2) A page with a bunch of information comes up about the different formats
>       available. Not clear exactly which link I should click; since I prefer
>       searchable HTML for documentation, 

Bad second reflex.  There's no such thing as searchable HTML.  Searching 
HTML is a job for a program that has nothing to do with the HTML 
document as such.  To make HTML documents searchable takes an extension 
to the web server --- we don't have that kind of control over our servers.

> Yet, *still*, nowhere does it say 'to plot with circles, use this 
> style.' I had to do trial and error to find the right symbol.

Of course it doesn't.  Because there's no such thing as a particular 
point symbol type that will generate circles on all terminals.  The 
reason for that being that there are terminals that can't do circles.

> I address this in my other follow-up. I would also like to mention that I feel
> when choices of symbol types are deliberate, it is unfortunate that gnuplot
> does not guarentee the same symbols across terminals.

It can't --- terminals are too different for that.