From graphics-request at octave dot org Tue Sep 27 10:57:57 2005
Subject: Re: Multicolor mesh plot patch
From: "John W. Eaton" <jwe at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu>
To: Petr Mikulik <mikulik at physics dot muni dot cz>
Cc: Quentin Spencer <qspencer at ieee dot org>, bug@octave.org, graphics@octave.org
Date: Tue, 27 Sep 2005 11:57:50 -0400

On 27-Sep-2005, Petr Mikulik wrote:

| The best way is that autoconf refuses to finish octave's configure if 
| gnuplot version is below a threshold. I propose that octave's configure 
| should require gnuplot 4.0 or higher.

I think that would be a bad thing.  I sometimes build Octave on
systems where I don't have gnuplot installed.  It would be annoying if
I couldn't finish the configure step without first installing gnuplot,
which I'm unlikely to use on those systems anyway (I'm just testing
the Octave build).  OTOH, I suppose we could offer a --without-gnuplot
option similar to the --without-readline option.

| I'd like to say I do not like that the recent Octave removed gset/graw 
| commands. Without them, no nice (publication quality) plots can be produced. 
| Writing all those long commands __gnuplot_set__ is a big nuisance; to fix 
| it, everybody will define his own gset.m/graw.m (or patch out Octave's nag 
| message). That's not the goal I think.

The gset and other gXXX commands are going away in Octave 3.0.

If I'm making publication quality graphs, I usually write out data
files and then use gnuplot directly.  I also usually use Make to drive
the whole process of generating data and making plots.  That way, the
rendering of the plot is separated from the generation of data.
Modifying the plot doesn't require repeating the calculation, which
might take a long time to do.

jwe