From octave-graphics-request at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu  Thu Feb 24 11:50:23 2000
Subject: gnuplot (Was: Re: New on the list : new plotting tool)
From: "John W. Eaton" <jwe at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu>
To: Teemu Ikonen <tpikonen at pcu dot helsinki dot fi>
Cc: Stephen Eglen <stephen at cogsci dot ed dot ac dot uk>,         Discussion list octave-graphics <octave-graphics@bevo.che.wisc.edu>
Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 11:50:58 -0600 (CST)

On 24-Feb-2000, Teemu Ikonen <tpikonen at pcu dot helsinki dot fi> wrote:

| A general plotting syntax would solve these problems and allow for a wider
| set of plotting programs to be used.

I'm all for this, if by `syntax' you really mean `collection of
functions' or `api' rather than introducing new commands in the
parser.  As I've said before, the gplot/gsplot/gset syntax is likely
to *only* work as an interface to gnuplot because it would be too
difficult to support using other plotting packages.

| Now gnuplot might be great for casual
| plotting and visualisation, but there are times when one needs to do
| something a bit more exotic and do it with publication quality.

| gnuplot
| isn't always up to this, as this amusing snippet from gnuplot FAQ
| 
| > http://www-ihe.etec.uni-karlsruhe.de/mitarbeiter/vonhagen/gnuplot-faq.html
| 
| shows:
| 
| ------clippety-clip------
| 
| 3.5 How do I change symbol size, line thickness and the like? 
| 
| Again, this depends on the terminal type. For PostScript, you can edit the
| generated PostScript file. An overview of what means what in the
| PostScript files gnuplot generates can be found at picard.tamu.edu in
| /pub/gnuplot/ as gs-ps.doc. A general introduction to PostScript can be
| found at unix.hensa.ac.uk in /pub/misc/ukc.reports/comp.sci/reports/ as
| 11-92.ps.Z. 
| 
| ------cloppety-clop------
| 
| I mean, we are living in the year 2000, right? :)

Dude, I think you have an out-of-date answer to this FAQ, or an old
version of gnuplot.  With 3.7, you can do

  set term postscript
  set output "foo.ps"
  plot sin(x) w l lw 5, cos(x) w l lw 10

to set the width of the lines.

This may not work from Octave using gplot (I can't remember if I added
code to handle the linewidth modifier) but it is possible to
specify the line width in gnuplot without having to edit PostScript.

jwe