Re: symbol/color/line consistency in terminals

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

On Saturday 10 February 2007 11:28, Daniel J Sebald wrote:
> Hans-Bernhard Br=F6ker wrote:
> >=20
> > That's because GD, last I looked, didn't support linewidths on patterne=
d=20
> > lines.  Which made it rather pointless to try and implement dashing for=
=20
> > the first three.
>=20
> I'm not real familiar with GD, but the header file has:
>=20
> gdImageSetStyle ();
> gdImageSetThickness ();

Take my word for it, the gd routines for dashed lines and for
linewidth are useless for our purposes.

We work around the latter by defining a finites size 'brush' for drawing,
but there is no easy work-around for dashed lines.  And given that
PNG output is normally for screen display, and thus color is far
more useful than dashes, there is little incentive to code up a hack.

Anyhow, if it's to be new code, it makes more sense to add that new code
to the gd library than to gnuplot.

You could ask Pierre Joye, who is now directing libgd development,
if he would be interested in accepting a patchset for libgd that
implements more useful support for linewidth+dashed lines. If libgd
provided such support, it would make sense for gnuplot to use it.

=2D-=20
Ethan A Merritt
Biomolecular Structure Center
University of Washington, Seattle 98195-7742