Re: underscore in text

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

On Monday, 21 October, 2013 19:41:20 Allin Cottrell wrote:
> 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.

Do those programs never use enhanced text mode?
If they do, then this conflict already existed.
If not, then wouldn't it be relatively painless for them to specify
"noenhanced" when selecting a terminal?  I imagine they already
have a standard set of properties that they use for terminal selection.

	Ethan




> 
> 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