From graphics-request at octave dot org Mon Jan 24 13:01:55 2005
Subject: Re: contour
From: Daniel J Sebald <daniel dot sebald at ieee dot org>
To: graphics at octave dot org
Cc: octave maintainers mailing list <maintainers at octave dot org>,         graphics@octave.org
Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2005 13:08:05 -0600

John W. Eaton wrote:

>On 24-Jan-2005, Daniel J Sebald <daniel dot sebald at ieee dot org> wrote:
>
>| Anyone recall the issue with the comment below?:
>| 
>|  -- Function File:  contour (X, Y, Z, N)
>|      Make a contour plot of the three-dimensional surface described by
>|      Z.  Someone needs to improve `gnuplot''s contour routines before
>|      this will be very useful.
>| 
>| What is the problem with gnuplot's contour?
>
>The problem I was thinking of when I wrote that comment was that
>gnuplot implements contour plots as a special type of 3D plot instead
>of a 2D plot.  So even though the final graph has only two dimensions,
>it has a much different appearance than other 2D plots produced by
>gnuplot and it is somewhat harder to combine a contour plot with
>general 2D data.
>  
>

Oh that.  Yeah.  There's been plenty discussion on the gnuplot list 
about the layout of 3D plots.  (In particular, many think the margin 
space is excessive in 3D plots.)  I'm one of the stronger advocates for 
makeing 2D/3D more consistent and, more specifically, pretty much the 
same code.  Slowly, code has been organized in that direction, but I 
don't think it will be until this summer that someone goes through the 
effort to cleanup the layout code.

>I think it would also be nice if it could embed the contour levels in
>the plot lines (I recall that there were plotting packages from the
>mid-eighties (or even before) that could do this).  Maybe gnuplot has
>this feature now?  I haven't checked.
>  
>

Not familiar with that, but I'll see what contour can do now.

Dan