Re: [Plplot-general] Should line width thinner than 1.0 be supported?

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

On 2013-01-28 17:18-0800 Alan W. Irwin wrote:

> On 2013-01-15 12:47+0800 Hǎiliàng Wáng wrote:
>
>> Hello,
>>
>> I'm plotting a small PDF graph (128x96) with cairopdf driver, and the
>> line width looks too thick with line width 1.
>>
>> To solve the problem, I modify the code within the cairo driver
>> (cairo.c) to set the the line width to 0.2 directly, and the result
>> looks pretty good.
>>
>> I have read the thread below so I know there is no plan to change
>> function plwid's parameter from int to float:
>> http://www.mail-archive.com/plp...@li.../msg00429.html
>
> Hi Hǎiliàng:
>
> "there is no plan to change" is a literally correct summation of what
> I said before, but I also emphasize now (if it wasn't clear before) I
> would like to see such a plan developed because integer widths for
> plwid are just too much of an API limitation these days.
>
> I think what we should do is deprecate plwid(PLINT width)
> and write a new function declared as
>
> void plwidth(PLFLT width);
>
> I will contine this discussion further on the PLplot development list.

Just to give everyone an update on this plplot-general list about the
results of that discussion on plplot-devel, the problem has been
almost entirely solved.  That solution involved touching a lot of
different files, and there are still some minor issues that need to be
polished up, but it is clear the next release of Plplot will have
floating point line widths.  So that is a big improvement on integer
line widths, and my thanks to Hǎiliàng for resurrecting the discussion
of this old issue and thus inspiring us to make the fix.

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); the Time
Ephemerides project (timeephem.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting
software package (plplot.sf.net); 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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