Re: How to use table header as title inside for loops?

[Juergen W. <wie...@fr...>]

Am Donnerstag, 12. März 2009 schrieb Ethan A Merritt:
> On Wednesday 11 March 2009, Mojca Miklavec wrote:
> > One more question. I know that the order of reading parameters is a
> > pretty sensitive issue in gnuplot, but it nevertheless confused me
> > that
> >     plot for [n=2:5] 'data.dat' using 1:n title column with lines
> >     plot for [n=2:5] 'data.dat' using 1:n with lines title "something"
> > both work while
> >     plot for [n=2:5] 'data.dat' using 1:n with lines title column
> > fails. Is that behaviour "compatible" with previous and future
> > versions of gnuplot?
>
> It is all part of the same problem.  The code that implements the
> 'using ... title column(foo)'  option is an ugly hack.
> It is a known bug, and has been on the list of things to fix for a long
> time.
>
> The reason it persists as a sore point rather than being fixed
> immediately is that in order to work properly it needs information that
> is only visible inside the datafile.c routines, whereas normally command
> options are parsed elsewhere.  To fix it we will have to rearrange the
> code, and/or introduce new global variables, etc.

One option would be to put the parsing code into a separate function
in datafile.c which is called on a keyword not known within
plot?d.c.  Though I suspect that this would not be too easy.  I do
not know how to set the default title then.

That said, I think it would have been a good idea to name the title
option in datafile.c something like "autot$itle".


Juergen