Re: controlling plot appearance (was "line graph problems")

[Craig Markwardt <craigmnet(at)cow.physics.wisc.edu>]

Martin Schultz <martin.schultz@dkrz.de> writes:
> You speak "out of my heart" here. And this is exactly the reason why
> David went ahead recently to develop a graphical tool to set up plot
> properties. Since it concentrates on getting the correct values for
> the myriad of plot keywords, it is not necessarily more "intuitive"
> than these, but at least you get "instant gratification" in that you
> can see what effect a keyword setting has. But if you are a little
> more "anal" in the ay things should look (this is a quote from several
> posts of David), there is really no way around messing with character
> sizes and positions - and here, IDL (at least in direct graphics) does
> a rather lousy job in providing the user with reasonable defaults or
> an easy reference frame. What is clearly missing, I think, is a
> "panel" coordinate system which would have "normal" coordinates with
> respect to a plot, not to the entire window or page. 
... other requests removed

I hear you Martin, and I agree with you.  We need more control over
our plots sometimes.

It dawned on me that we may not need *more* keywords to PLOT.  Rather,
there should be a simple way to piece together a plot from simple
primitives.  AXIS is a good start be we need other primitives to
establish coordinate systems and perform data scaling.  Instead of
shoehorning more stuff into a monolithic plot command, it should be
easier to compose our own plot from simple elements.  *Then*, in the
simple elements we can add these extra features.

In any case, I don't think it matters.  RSI probably considers direct
graphics to be the wave of the past.

Craig

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Craig B. Markwardt, Ph.D.         EMAIL:    craigmnet@cow.physics.wisc.edu
Astrophysics, IDL, Finance, Derivatives | Remove "net" for better response
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