colors for gd.trm terminals [Re: differences between the gnuplot binary and its help]

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

On Tuesday 23 February 2010 02:45:54 Shigeharu TAKENO wrote:
> shige 02/23 2010
> ----------------
> 
> Recently, a new book for gnuplot-4.2 was published last year, 
> written by M.Yamamoto in Japanese. In it, he pointed out some 
> problems about differences between the gnuplot binary and its 
> help.
> 
> 2) Help for png/jpeg/png terminal says:
> 
>       set terminal gif medium size 640,480 \
>                        xffffff x000000 x404040 \
>                        xff0000 xffa500 x66cdaa xcdb5cd \
>                        xadd8e6 x0000ff xdda0dd x9500d3    # defaults
> 
> However these colors are not the defaults of the terminals. 
> I think the comment "#defaults" should be removed.

You are correct.  This entire mechanism is obsolete.
In fact, the command does not seem to work as documented in the 
current 4.4 or 4.5 cvs source, even apart from issue of the default
values.
   
[and what did it ever mean "the x and y axis color"??
 Was it ever possible to use colors for the x and y axes that
 were different from the border color?]
 
I suggest that we should remove this section from the documentation.
Instead we will cross-reference the sections explaining that colors
can now be specified for all terminals using commands such as 
	plot ... lc rgbcolor "#RRGGBB"
	set border lc rgbcolor "#RRGGBB"
or
	set linetype N lc rgbcolor '#RRGGBB"

The png/gif/jpeg terminals can continue to accept this terminal option
for backwards compatibility with old scripts even though it is no longer
recommended, documented, or supported.

However, interpretation of the very first color as the background
color must remain.  There is currently no other way to set the background
color correctly for the png and jpeg terminals.  It would be reasonable
to add new command "set background", but we don't have such a thing now.  


	Ethan