Use Scale or Mark-Compute-Unmark to create scaled or displaced lines and Collect however many you make. The idea is not unlike what you suggest in the module with the lines being separated by less than a pixel.
The results with Ribbon or Tube are a set of triangles derived from whatever lines are passed to it. This can be a single line or a group of lines. Both methods are not satisfactory when changing camera views significantly (i.e, zooming in). What you suggest is absolutely correct. We are really discussing various workarounds. So, your patch is welcomed. I was only offering the idea of using Scale or Mark-Compute-Unmark for those users that may not want to incorporate a new module on their own or want to attempt something simpler for right now. The difference between hardware and software rendering is historical. Originally DX had only s/w rendering (3d graphics hardware wasn't all that common in those days and DX was initially developed for a 32-way SMP with the idea of rendering and other operations running in parallel). Hardware rendering was added later (GL on IBM in 1991 and GL on SGI, Starbase on HP and XGL on Sun in 1992). After OpenGL support was implemented a few years after that, were additional features like multi-pixel and anti-aliased lines and translucency eventually included. The basic decade-old-architecture for s/w rendering has not been updated. There are lots of other differences, but that's a long story, some of which is discussed in the documentation. Moritz Franosch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>@opendx.watson.ibm.com on 08/18/2000 03:00:48 PM Please respond to [email protected] Sent by: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [email protected] cc: Subject: Re: [opendx-dev] [PATCH] option line width does not work with software rendering [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: > One can also do something simpler without a module, although not as > completely -- a simple macro with either Scale or by Mark'g > positions. I don't understand how Scale and Mark can be used to increase line widths. > In > addition, Ribbon or Tube can be employed, after which I would recommend > Remove(,"normals"). With these modules you can draw a single thick line (example program PlotLine2). What I want and what's necessary is to increase the thickness of all lines to, say, 5 pixels independent of any scaling, orientation or camera position. This includes tick marks, tick mark values, captions, the box around a 3D plot, the graphs of a 2D plot and axis labels. They are simply too thinn on a high resolution printout. I think my patch provides a simple and efficient solution. In addition, why should software rendering give substantially different results from hardware rendering? Thank you for your reply, Moritz
