Plotting API?

[John W. Eaton]

On  3-Jun-2007, Søren Hauberg wrote:

|    Since I'm looking into documenting the plotting system I've spend 
| some time learning the API (I only use a small subset of it most of the 
| time). So I have some questions/comments...
| 
| 1) What does 'newplot' do? Should it be documented or is an internal 
| function?
| 
| 2) The 'contourc' returns a matrix that contains (x,y) sequences of 
| varying lengths. This must be done for the sake of matlab compatibility, 
| but it is a really awful data structure. Could we add a fourth input 
| argument to the function? If this was the string "cell", the output 
| would instead be represented as a cell array, which really must be the 
| right data structure for this.
| 
| 3) This isn't API related (sorry), but could histograms drawn by 'hist' 
| (or is it 'bar') be drawn with filled boxes? I find the white boxes that 
| I currently get are hard to look at. (I often use 'stem' to draw 
| histograms, as that is easier to look at).
| 
| 4) Most of the plotting functions (except 'plot') doesn't seem to accept 
| "property"/"value" style arguments such as "LineWidth", 2. This includes 
| the following functions "fplot", "polar", "stem", "stairs", and "mesh". 
| Should this be considered a bug, or is it intentional (perhaps a gnuplot 
| limitation) ?

Since we are attempting to Matlab compatible with these functions, I
think it is best to see whether the current implementations are
compatible (at least with the documented behavior of Matlab).  If they
are not, then file bug reports.

jwe