Re: [Gnuplot-info] "set key noautotitle" ignored on explicit column name?

[Ethan A M. <eam...@gm...>]

On Wednesday, 12 March 2014 11:05:50 PM Rhys Ulerich wrote:
> Hi Ethan,
> 
> Thanks for taking a look and the time to respond.
> 
> > Because in the 4th plots you tell it to read the columnheader
> > (in order to find column "x") and so the input data must necessarily
> > _have_ columnheaders.  That is the same thing that
> > you are telling it with "set key autotitle columnheader".
> > Same request - same result.
> >
> > Therefore plot #4 shows the intended behaviour.
> 
> I have a use case where that behavior becomes a decided usability hiccup.
> 
> set key autotitle
> plot 'foo.dat' using 0:"x", 'bar.dat' using 0:"x"
> 
> Now I have two autotitled legend entries that uselessly both say "x".
> I can't tell them apart.  The file name is the only distinguishing
> feature and using "x" suppresses the filenames' appearance.  I
> implicitly didn't ask for column headers because I omitted
> "columnheader" when turning on autotitling.  I can't turn this
> behavior off because there's no "set key autotitle nocolumnheader".
> 
> The usability hiccup becomes worse as the number of files involved and
> number of columns increase.  I'm somewhere in the 30+ files and 200+
> column range on a daily basis.
> - Rhys

Apart from the question of whether a new or modified variant of
"set key autotitle" is warranted, I suggest that for plotting 
30 files with column 'x' an appropriate set of commands is

  LIST = "file1 file2 file3 .... file30"
  plot for [NAME in LIST] NAME.".dat" using 0:"x" title NAME

		Ethan