Re: metapost terminal

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

Hans-Bernhard Broeker <broeker <at> physik.rwth-aachen.de> writes:
 
> Not necessarily.  The general method for platforms that don't support
> patterns in some native way is to draw them as lots of individual lines.
> That's possible because we do pattern-filling only for boxes.

Do you mean that there is some software level option that can be set in the
terminal driver to make the calling code use primitive line drawing commands of
the terminal to draw the patterns?

If this less automatic, i.e. the driver has to do it itself, then indeed it
should be fairly easy to write metapost macros filling boxes with patterns. In
fact in metapost it is not that much harder to do it for any shapes. The main
issue for me now is to know what are the patterns to be drawn. 

What is the chance that gnuplot will support pattern filling for other shapes
than boxes in future?

> > I have noticed also another difference. The grid lines are solid in
> > metapost output and dashed (dotted?) in postscript output. Shall I look
> > into making those the same?
> 
> Not necessary.  As long as the grid line style is noticably lighter than
> the borders, you're OK.  Some terminals dot it, some draw it in gray, some
> others combine those two.

The distinction between grid line style and other lines is fairly good with on
screen postscript previewers, but it is much less clear on the printout IMHO.
Personally I prefer solid grid to the dotted one, but I would make it slightly
thinner.


Andrzej