Re: Changing mark/space for dashed lines in plots

[Rik]

On 07/02/2014 11:03 AM, Ben Abbott wrote:
> On Jul 2, 2014, at 12:35 PM, Rik <address@hidden> wrote:
>
>> 7/2/14
>>
>> All,
>>
>> If you take a look at the plot comparisons for plotyy_03 at
>> tech-chat.de/compare_plot_demos you will see that Octave uses a fairly
>> chunky dashed line for the '--' linestyle while both gnuplot and Matlab use
>> a slimmer dashed line.
>>
>> It is rather easy to change the appearance of our dashed line, but I wanted
>> to collect some opinions about whether to do it and which style to use if
>> we do change.
>>
>> Attached are three pdfs showing the various line styles.  The first is the
>> current style, dash_50 uses 50% mark/50% space, dash_75 uses 75% mark/25%
>> space.  Send back opinions to the maintainer's list.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Rik
>>
>>
>>
>> <dash_current.pdf><dash_50.pdf><dash_75.pdf>
> RIk,
>
> I prefer dash_50.pdf.
>
> However, since we'll not all agree ... Is this something that can be set in 
> the preferences?

The code that is affected is in gl-render.cc and is currently a compiled
constant so it isn't immediately available as a preference.  Of course,
things could be recoded so that the line primitive object had an additional
Octave-only property to set the mark/space ratio.  On the other hand, no
one to date has been so unhappy with the existing line style to want to do
that.  I think if we just pick something reasonable, including possible the
current style, then most people will be content enough.

--Rik