On 2009-08-18 16:45-0500 Hezekiah M. Carty wrote: > PLplot has apparently had, for some time, a commented-out alternate > color map 0 with a white background and multiple foreground colors. I > think that this, or a similar cmap0, is worth including with PLplot.
I agree that looks pretty good and is worth preserving as yet another palette file. > I have attached the pngcairo output from the first page of example 2 > as an illustration of this alternative palette versus the default > palette. If there are no objections I will add this as > cmap0_alternate.pal to the PLplot trunk. Any suggestions for a better > file name? Palette file names that actually describe the colours in the palette are going to be virtually impossible to realize in general so I suggest we should normally use a memorable name for palette files following some naming convention we all agree on. For example, we could take names from the collection of Arabic names for stars (betelgeuse, etc.) or the collection of names donoting bird genera, or whatever takes our fancy (so long as there is lots of choice of names). (When we had a similar problem naming the computers in our astrogroup back in 1991 we decided on a marine animal naming theme which explains my e-mail address.) > > Is it worth adding a PLplot cmake/compile-time option to change the > default color map 0 to this or some other alternate? This would allow > someone who wants white backgrounds to be the rule rather than the > exception to avoid having to set the palette for each plot. I think this is a good idea. The DEFAULT_CMAP0_FILE and DEFAULT_CMAP1_FILE options (to pick some reasonable names for those cmake options) should just be a PLplot builder-specified string corresponding to one of the existing cmap[01] palette files in the standard places where palette files appear (which includes the current directory for those who really want to play with colour schemes). If those options were not specified, then the fallback for the default would be the existing cmap[01]_default.pal files which give the default colour scheme that our traditional users expect. Such a change would also allow us to do the initial setup of cmap0 and cmap1 when libplplot is opened using the specified default palette files. I feel such use of palette files to initialize cmap[01] is an improvement over the current hard-coded specification of the default cmap0 and cmap1 when libplplot is opened. Alan __________________________ Alan W. Irwin Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca). Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software package (plplot.org); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net). __________________________ Linux-powered Science __________________________ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Let Crystal Reports handle the reporting - Free Crystal Reports 2008 30-Day trial. Simplify your report design, integration and deployment - and focus on what you do best, core application coding. Discover what's new with Crystal Reports now. http://p.sf.net/sfu/bobj-july _______________________________________________ Plplot-devel mailing list Plplot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-devel
