Re: linetype vs linestyle mess

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

On Friday 07 March 2008 17:55, Ralf Juengling wrote:
> 
> I think a clean solution would be to phase out the
> use of linetypes in plot commands altogether.

It's almost at that point now.  I use it that way already.
In the cvs version (but not I think in 4.2) the line style
defaults to the linetype of the same number, so mostly it
"just works". The are 2 tricky points:

1) As you noted, the line styles themselves are defined in terms
   of linetype.  So we have a bit of a circularity problem :-)

2) color assignments for contours don't work. It's the same
   problem as with the hidden surface colors, but much worse.

There may be a few other corner cases. Mostly it would just
need a lot of testing.  After settling the 2 issues above we
could switch it over in CVS and let people gradually flush
out any problems.


> Instead, the plot command would cycle through line
> styles. There would be a set of pre-defined default
> line styles, the definitions you get now with
> 
>     set style line <n> default
> 
> for n=1..1000, or something like that.
> For backwards compatibility 'lt x' in a plot command
> would be interpreted as 'ls x'. There is no need for
> 
>     set style increment user
> 
> it can be declared deprecated (for backwards
> compatibility it would be a command without effect).
> Linetypes would be used in defining line styles only,
> 
>     set style line 1 lt 5 lw 2 lc rgb "green"
> 
> Ralf
> 
> 

-- 
Ethan A Merritt            Courier Deliveries: 1959 NE Pacific
Dept of Biochemistry
Health Sciences Building
University of Washington - Seattle WA 98195-7742