Metapost term and solid filling

[<wa...@ga...>]

Hi,

I am trying to use the metapost terminal to produce a bar chart
(boxes). One of the several problems I have is that despite that
style solid is on, metapost term just outputs line drawing. I looked
into the generated code and apparently right metapost fill commands are
note generated at all.

So I grabbed the CVS release of gnuplot and it does not seem that there
is any difference in there. Since I got the code it was pretty easy to
find the actual terminal file and patch it slightly:

--- term/metapost.trm	2004-04-13 19:24:34.000000000 +0200
+++ ../gnuplot--mydev/term/metapost.trm	2004-06-05 22:56:44.833836616 +0200
@@ -799,22 +799,29 @@
 TERM_PUBLIC void
 MP_boxfill(sty, x1, y1, wd, ht)
 int sty;
 unsigned int x1, y1, wd, ht;
 {
     /* for now simply clear box if sty <= 0, do nothing otherwise */
     if (MP_inline)
 	MP_endline();
-    if (sty <= 0)
+    if (sty <= 0) {
 	fprintf(gpoutfile, "\
 fill (%.1fa,%.1fb)--(%.1fa,%.1fb)--(%.1fa,%.1fb)--(%.1fa,%.1fb)--cycle withcolor background;\n",
 		x1 / 10.0, y1 / 10.0, (x1 + wd) / 10.0, y1 / 10.0,
 		(x1 + wd) / 10.0, (y1 + ht) / 10.0, x1 / 10.0,
 		(y1 + ht) / 10.0);
+    } else {
+      fprintf(gpoutfile, "\
+fill (%.1fa,%.1fb)--(%.1fa,%.1fb)--(%.1fa,%.1fb)--(%.1fa,%.1fb)--cycle withpen (pencircle scaled 0pt);\n",
+	      x1 / 10.0, y1 / 10.0, (x1 + wd) / 10.0, y1 / 10.0,
+	      (x1 + wd) / 10.0, (y1 + ht) / 10.0, x1 / 10.0,
+	      (y1 + ht) / 10.0);
+    }
 }
 
This version produces excellent boxes plots (in fact metapost processed
gnuplot graphs are so much more beatiful than those produced with
postscript term directly!). 

My question is: why is this not implemented this way? 

The original maintainer might have a good reason (see the
comment: "do nothing otherwise"). I am not a gnuplot developer, so I
have no clue if this things breakes anything in other with-styles etc.

Andrzej