Re: [transferred from Email] Providing/exporting a table of plot style properties

[Ralf J. <jue...@cs...>]

On Sun, 4 Jan 2009, Hans-Bernhard Bröker wrote:

>> Ralf's proposed table would also hold properties like
>> PLOT_STYLE_HAS_FILL that are currently single bits set in the
>> line style definitions in gp_types.h
>
> I agree that that part would make sense.
>
>> As you move into that kind of question, I start to think that
>> the whole idea of a fixed set of properties for a given plot
>> type breaks down.
>
> Indeed.  The original design has been thoroughly swamped under by new 
> features.  We're doing so much stuff outside (or in conflict with) the 
> concept of plot styles that it's hard to see what it was originally meant to 
> be: a complete description of how a given dataset would be displayed.
> And not a lot of that is described too well in the documentation, either...

Hm, aren't you mixing different things here?
A feature like 'using xticslabel(1)' is not specific to plot-styles,
it works for all of them. These newer features may have affected
the parts of the data reading machinery that currently includes
plot style properties hard-coded (plot2d.c:get_data()), but that
does not make them plot style properties.

Here are the properties that I consider worth knowing; as a direct
user of gnuplot, I sometimes want to job my memory and look them up;
as an author of some other application that generates gnuplot script,
I want to query them:

* plot style keyword
* number of basic data colums in 2d (excluding lc variable, ps variable)
* if applicable, number of basic data colums in 3d
* does expect non-numeric data
* does accept line style specifiers
* does accept point style specifiers
* does accept fill style specifiers

The two questions now are: Is a help command delivering such a
summary a desirable feature? Is it a good idea to fix this in code
as a table?


Ralf