Re: Tweak for interactive SVGs?

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

On Sunday 14 December 2008, Bill Broadley wrote:
> 
> I've been generating some plots that get a bit busy, sometimes it's nice to be
> able to toggle what you see.  So I wrote a script to tweak the gnuplot output,
> and it generates:
>          http://cse.ucdavis.edu/bill/barc.svg
> 
> Try clicking on any of key titles like "1-thread add".  Currently it's a short
> perl script.  The changes are just things like adding a
> onclick=ToggleVisibilty call for each key text entry, adding a id= group for
> each line in the graph, and of course the small routine to actually toggle the
> visibility.
> 
> Any comments on how hard it would be to add to the gnuplot SVG output routine?
> How useful? 
> Would a reasonably written patch to do this be accepted?

That's very nice.

Please have a look at the patchset  #2172587  "Embedded hyperlinks"
https://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=2172587&group_id=2055&atid=302055

That patchset contains an extension to the svg terminal driver that does
something parallel to your idea. It wraps each plot (and key entry) in
a group with an attached xlink hyperref.   

It may be that you could re-use much of that code.
It may also be that you can see a cleaner way to do it, or better yet
propose an extension that handles both uses via the same mechanism.

As to the associated routine that does the toggling, here also I would 
very much encourage brainstorming about how this could be made as 
general as possible. My long-term vision for the svg terminal
(a goal that I keep trying to hand off to someone else :-)
is to  provide all the necessary infrastructure for a set of associated
scripts to carry out client-side mousing operations like the existing
interactive terminals.  I had been thinking mostly of mouse-tracking and
zoom, but your example makes me realize that other operations like 
toggling the grid or ruler bars are even easier.

-- 
Ethan A Merritt