Re: Oddities when plotting "with labels"

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

On Sunday 28 January 2007 12:58, Mike Sutton wrote:
> The comma in the offset specification confuses the command line parser.
>   plot 'mike3.dat'  with labels left offset 3,3 , 'mike4.dat' with points
>         duplicated or contradicting arguments in plot options

Yes, I had totally forgotten about that. Thanks for the reminder.
It is a known problem, but is probably fixable.

> A work around is to make sure the "with labels" is the last thing plotted.

Other work-arounds:
- Give a dummy z coordinate in the offset
	plot 'mike3' with labels left offset 3,3,0, 'mike4' with points
- put an attribute keyword after the offset
	plot 'mike3' with labels offset 3,3 left, 'mike4' with points
- even if it's a useless attribute
	plot 'mike3' with labels offset 3,3 nopoint, 'mike4' with points

> I think a note should be added to the 4.2 documentation about this limitation.

Yes, if no trivial fix is found.
The trick will be to put the note in a place that users will actually find.

 
> So I started playing around with the text color.  
>     plot 'mike3.dat' w labels left  tc rgb "blue"
> 
> This works for RC4 but not for the CVS HEAD (4.3).  I have not investigated 
> why "tc rgb 'color'" does not work for 4.3.  It always comes up black. 

Huh. You are right. That's a strange one.
I have absolutely no idea what has gone wrong.

> I have also thought that the addition of a label style, analogous to 
> linestyle,  would be useful.

I have a slightly different approach already on my TODO list.
Rather than using linestyle as a model, I was thinking that there should
be the equivalent of
	set style histogram
	set style fill
	set style object rectangle
Each of these defines a set of default properties for all instances of
the respective plot elements.  

In the case of labels, my idea was that if a specific label
command does not set a font, say, then its font field is set to DEFAULT
and inherits the current value in the generic label style. Thus if you
were to set 100 labels in advance, perhaps plotting to judge visual effect,
you could change all of them at once to use a smaller font by saying
	set style label font "Times,9"

I take it your idea is similar, except that there would be multiple
predefined label styles rather than a single default style. Right?

-- 
Ethan A Merritt
Biomolecular Structure Center
University of Washington, Seattle 98195-7742