Re: special behavior of postscript terminal? (again)

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

On Thursday 23 October 2008 12:30:21 Allin Cottrell wrote:
> On Mon, 20 Oct 2008, Ethan Merritt wrote:
> 
> > 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.
> 
> It seems to me that a nice solution would be if "set style line" 
> were extended to include a "dashtype/dt" option, in the same way 
> that pointtype can be selected independently of other features of 
> the line.  

Isn't that what it does now?
Each line type has an explicit dash pattern, selected by saying "lt N",
analogous to selecting point type by saying "pt N".
 
> To be a bit more explicit, the idea is that you  
> wouldn't need to set a top-level "dashed" option, but could choose 
> from a common enumeration of types such as
> 
> 0 = solid
> 1 = regular dashes
> 2 = dots
> 3 = short dashes
> 4 = dash-dot ...
> 
> (or some such), with the understanding that not all terminals 
> would necessarily support all options.

Is there a difference between this and simply deciding to set
all terminals to dashed mode by default?  What you are describing is,
so far as I understand it, the way it already works.  This is exactly
what is shown by the demo I pointed to.

The limitation that I see in the current setup is that you pretty
much have to set up all these line styles in advance;  you can't
easily just toggle dashed mode on for one line out of 20.
It is possible, but only by explicitly by setting the characteristics
of the other 19 lines to "lt 1 lc N".

-- 
Ethan A Merritt