[Discuss] PLplot and gnuplot

[Alan W. Irwin]

On 2007-03-19 08:54-0700 pw wrote:

> Out of curiosity, does PLplot allow a background colour other
> than black? Printing black graphs is rather taxing on the printer ink.

Yes, see
http://plplot.sourceforge.net/docbook-manual/plplot-html-5.7.2/plscolbg.html.
If you follow up links there, you will see the user naturally has complete
control to change all colours from their default values.  For example, the
python scripts that manage my research plots have some boiler-plate code in
them to provide the colours I prefer.  In the future, we plan to put such
boilerplate colour code into PLplot itself so that users have a convenient
choice of different pre-built colour themes.  But that colour theming code
has not been implemented yet so currently each PLplot user has to put
together colour schemes on their own.

Getting back to octave PLplot support, I don't know the details, but there
is a low-level octave PLplot API that was used to create the standard
examples that I referred to before, and also a high-level octave PLplot API
that is much more akin to what octave users expect (and probably close to
what you had in mind) that wraps the low-level API.  In the examples/octave
directory the examples starting with "x" use the low-level API, and the
examples starting with "p" use the high-level API.  If you would like to add
to the high-level API, I would be very happy to accept patches (subject to
approval by our octave expert, of course).  If you would like to see what
some of those "p" examples look like, then simply use the -DBUILD_TEST=ON
option to cmake followed by the "make" and "ctest --tests-regex octave"
commands.  ("ctest" on its own tests all examples for all interface languages,
the --tests-regex octave option to that command just selects the octave
language test).

Alan
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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 Yorick front-end to PLplot (yplot.sf.net); the
Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project
(lbproject.sf.net).
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Linux-powered Science
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