Re: symbol/color/line consistency in terminals

[Daniel J S. <dan...@ie...>]

Ethan A Merritt wrote:
> On Saturday 10 February 2007 11:28, Daniel J Sebald wrote:
> 
>>Hans-Bernhard Bröker wrote:
>>
>>>That's because GD, last I looked, didn't support linewidths on patterned 
>>>lines.  Which made it rather pointless to try and implement dashing for 
>>>the first three.
>>
>>I'm not real familiar with GD, but the header file has:
>>
>>gdImageSetStyle ();
>>gdImageSetThickness ();
> 
> 
> Take my word for it, the gd routines for dashed lines and for
> linewidth are useless for our purposes.

Some way of specifying a resolution for PNG-like terminals might be nice.  Am I overlooking something?

If I say

set term png size 1280,960
set output 'test.png'
text
set output

the result is a 1280 x 960 PNG image with the same resolution as the previous 640 x 480 PNG image.  That is, depending on one's viewpoint, it's as though every plot item has become 1/2 the size relative to the plot coordinate system.

The PNG documentation says something about "set size", but that doesn't achieve the concept of increasing resolution, just changes the portion of the PNG array used.

Now, I guess I could increase resolution by making the pointsize twice as big, line thickness twice as big, etc.  In fact, this setting

set term png giant size 1280,960
set pointsize 2.5

makes the symbol samples in "test" about the same as other plots (30 to 35 examples in the column) and the symbols are pretty good resolution.  But that doesn't exactly give the desired overall effect.  Adjusting so much becomes inconvenient.

So, it seems to me that with PNG one is inherently restricted to low resolution plots.  One could argue it is for network graphics, but still 1000x1000 in a compact format like PNG doesn't seem excessive.

Say there were a "resolution #" option that would internally scale line thickness, pointsize, and fonts (have to have a mapping to medium, large, giant... unfortunately the largest font doesn't have very high resolution).

Dan