Re: [Plplot-general] Plot line width

[Alan W. I. <ir...@be...>]

On 2008-11-16 08:20-0800 R C wrote:

> Hi,
> Is there a way to increase the plot line width  for eps output? plwid works for png but not for ps or psttf.

Each of the various file and library standards interpret width differently.
Some take a float representing the width, some take an integer representing
the width.  All have various interpretations about how the width value that
is specified translates into visual appearance.  For example, the PostScript
file standard has rather high width resolution, i.e., each change in integer
value results in a rather small visual change in width.  Currently, the
PLplot approach is to interpret the width value specified by the user with
plwid as a "raw" value to be directly interpreted (differently) by the
various file and library standards.

Thus, to solve your immediate problem try setting a substantially larger
value (2x or 3x) of the width to see an obvious visual change for PostScript
devices.

At one point we did try scaling the width values so that each device
interprets the PLplot width with similar visual results. However, the
implementation was done in such a way that devices with coarse width
resolution were interpreted the same as before while the devices with fine
width resolution such as PostScript became unacceptably coarse so we
abandoned that approach.  There are some possible ways out of this mess, but
they all imply serious disruptions for our users such as changing the plwid
argument from an integer to a float with a value of 1.0 looking the same for
all devices.  We will have to think very clearly about this issue and
ultimately we may just decide to minimize the disruption for our users and
continue with the present "raw" width approach despite its obvious drawbacks.

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation
for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software
package (plplot.org); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of
Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project
(lbproject.sf.net).
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