Re: underscore in text

[Allin C. <cot...@wf...>]

On Mon, 21 Oct 2013, Ethan A Merritt wrote:

> On Monday, 21 October, 2013 16:19:48 Allin Cottrell wrote:
>> I'm wondering when this changed, and whether the change was intentional:
>> it used to be that if you did, say,
>>
>> set title 'Under_score'
>>
>> then (at least when using the wxt and x11 terminals) the text came out
>> shown, with an underscore. Now (recent CVS[*]) The underscore produces a
>> subscript 's' (in wxt and x11).
>
> Recent cvs defaults to enhanced text mode.

Ah, I see.

For my personal use of gnuplot I wouldn't have a problem with using 
the "noenhanced" keyword if I wanted a literal underscore. The 
practical issue is that gnuplot is used as the plotting engine for 
other programs and that, in general, the names of variables that 
could be plotted might well contain underscores; and the names of 
variables can easily find their way into titles.

If this change goes into "production", coders (such as myself) who 
make "third-party" use of gnuplot will have to be careful to 
modulate gnuplot titling commands per version.

> The motivation for the change was to support "prettier" default formats for
> axis tic labels.  The new default format " %h" produces, for example,
> 1.2 x 10^6     as a label rather than   1.2e06
> See discussion here:
>     https://sourceforge.net/p/gnuplot/patches/637/
> and here
>     https://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=31498730
>
> It seemed kind of pointless to change the default format without also
> enabling the enhanced text mode needed to produce it.

OK. Pity the screenshots referenced in the text don't seem to be 
available. But on this matter I'm not fully persuaded in favor of 
the (more verbose and therefore more likely to cause interference in 
tighly tic'd plots) "1.2 x 10^6" versus "1.2e06". As you say in that 
exchange, "ugliness" in tic labels is mostly a matter of 
inconsistency (or excessive population of zeros).

> What would you prefer?
> Revert the change in default terminal setting?
> Revert the default state of just the "set title" command?
> More obvious warnings that something has changed?
> Some other combination?

Well, I don't want to stand in the way of progress ;-) I think I 
have to experiment a bit before offering an opinion.

Allin Cottrell