Re: special behavior of postscript terminal? (again)

[Allin C. <cot...@wf...>]

On Mon, 20 Oct 2008, Ethan Merritt wrote:

> On Monday 20 October 2008 16:07:11 Allin Cottrell wrote:
> > "With most terminal types, if you specify a color plot then it 
> > seems that by default solid lines are used, not dash patterns, for 
> > line graphs.  However, the postscript terminal behaves 
> > differently: it uses dash patterns by default even when color mode 
> > is selected."
> > 
> > "I think it would be preferable if the post terminal behaved in 
> > the same way as the others."
> > 
> > Are there good reasons for not doing this?  
> 
> I know of only one, but it's a core element of the development policy:
> being consistent with the way it has worked for the last 20 years.

That's fair enough.

> I see two ways to move forward; there may be others:
> 
> 1) Formulate a more general model in which you can specify dash-pattern
> as an independent property at all times.  Most of the code necessary to
> support this is already in place
> (see http://gnuplot.sourceforge.net/demo_4.3/dashcolor.htm )
> but it is not exposed to the user in a friendly fashion.

That looks interesting.  But am I right in thinking that the 
dash-pattern spec doesn't work for x11, png, pngcairo and
pdfcairo?  (It does for postscript.)

> 2) Allow the user to customize the default order of line 
> properties across all terminals.  I have posted a series of 
> patches to implement this, patchset #2004590, but haven't 
> received much feedback.  If you invoke your preferred line style 
> definitions in ~/.gnuplot, then the "set terminal" options for 
> solid/dash are irrelevant.

Thanks, I'll take a look at that.

Allin Cottrell