(no subject)

[<em...@ru...>]

Hello

I've just recently updated to gnuplot 4.0 from 3.7.0, and I'm loving it!  The
mousing features make it more appealing for dealing with spectra, and as such
there's a feature I'd like to put in some time.

I have to plot lots of infrared spectra, and because of the nature of the data
it's not very instructive to plot it on an ordinary linear scale.  The older
convention was to make the x-axis logarithmic, and early instruments actually
had a log plotter tied mechanically to the guts of the spectrometer.  With the
advent of FT-IR instruments, the preferred way became to use a combination of
two linear scales on the x-axis.  So, your x-axis might look like this:

... +----------+----------+----------+----------+----------+----------+ ...
   2800        2400       2000       1800       1600       1400       1200

For mid-infrared spectra, the data follows the first linear scale (say 400
wavenumbers per inch) down to 2000 wavenumbers, whereafter the scale changes to
200 wavenumbers per inch.  It's much the same effect as a log scale, of course,
but it just makes it easier to work out at a glance where you are on the scale
without the use of funny paper.

My thought (without having delved deeply into the source code, I must admit) is
to give the user one more type of scale much like logscale which they can
select.  So one might go

   set irscale

to get this kind of scale.  I'm not so sure what do with things like xrange and
so on, and perhaps some optional arguments might be in order to tell the
program where to do what, although there's not much need for customization
here.

Do you think this might be worth adding?  If so, can you think of a better
way to implement it, from the user's point of view?  I'd like to have some
expert opinions before I start messing around too much.  Just now someone tells
me there's a simple way to do this already ;)

Regards,

Emmanuel