Re: set style increment user

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

On Wed, 2 Jul 2014, Christoph Bersch wrote:

> Am 02.07.2014 16:50, schrieb Allin Cottrell:
>> The above-noted "set" option is one that is gone in 5.0. I'm not sure what
>> is the recommended replacement. I'm thinking of this sort of thing in
>> gnuplot 4:
>>
>> set style line 1 <whatever>
>> set style line 2 <whatever>
>> set style line 3 <whatever>
>> set style increment user
>> plot <data1> w l, <data2> w l, <data3> w l
>>
>> and the 3 lines would come out in the respective 3 user-defined styles.
>> Now admittedly the "increment user" thing seemed a bit odd; you might
>> expect the user-defined line-styles to apply automatically. However, it
>> did the job. Now that it's gone, is there a compact alternative way of
>> telling gnuplot to use user-defined styles in sequence?
>
> Now you can directly change the linetypes with
>
> set linetype 1 <whatever>
> set linetype 2 <whatever>
> set linetype 3 <whatever>
> plot x w l, x**2 w l, x**3 w l
>
> Note, that these settings cannot be reverted by `reset`, but you must
> use `reset session`.

Thanks. The new design is an improvement in its own right (use "set 
linetype" and you don't have to bother with the "increment" switch). 
But if the "increment" thing is gone this will break a lot of 
existing gnuplot scripts that use "set style line" -- and also a 
fair amount of third-party code that generates such scripts.

I notice that the current doc for 5.0 just says that "set style 
increment user" is "deprecated". However, it's actually _gone_ 
unless you explicitly configure with

--enable-backwards-compatibility

I have no problem with deprecating it in favour of the new approach, 
but trashing it at this point seems extreme.

Allin Cottrell