To all those interested in our new plcolorbar functionality plus a release-related question at the end for Hazen.
I have made a series of scattered commits over the last several weeks which refine the new plcolorbar function, and more such commits are in the planning stages. However, I have just reached a milestone (the new version of the plcolorbar code works as well as the old version but with increased functionality) so this seemed a good opportunity to give a current (revision 11769) status report for my changes. In general what I have done are API changes and internal changes to put more control of the colorbar in the hands of the user; to disentangle the effects of position options from non-position options so I could use the pllegend positioning scheme for plcolorbar; and to add new colorbar functionality such as optional filling and outlining of the boundary box. The plcolorbar API changes have been propagated to C examples 16 and 33 (currently only displayed when the -colorbar option is specified by the user for those two examples). The example 16 and 33 colorbar results look essentially the same except for the example 33 addition of showing the bounding box to diagnose current issues with the bounding box. Currently the bounding box does account for the undecorated colorbar + the colorbar caps but ignores the numerical tick labels and overall text labels. My next planned steps are to address those last two bounding box issues. The positioning scheme depends on the size of the bounding box so once those issues are addressed it should no longer be necessary to fiddle with offsets to make room for numerical tick labels and text labels written by plcolorbar (since the bounding box will correctly enclose those labels much like what happens for pllegend now). Once, I am happy with the colorbar bounding box, then I will finish up my work on this project for now by extensivily modifying example 33 to pack more colorbar results per page and to do wider testing of all the plcolorbar combinations that are possible. Hez has been out of e-mail contact for a couple of weeks now, but I assume once I am done with my plcolorbar efforts there may be more plcolorbar refinements he wants to do before our forthcoming release. In any case, we will be sure to emphasize in the release announcement that plcolorbar is experimental API that is subject to change. Once we gain more experience with plcolorbar during the next release cycle, I am sure (like what happened for pllegend) that there will be additional API changes required. N.B. Because of those expected API changes, do not propagate plcolorbar to any other language bindings or examples until we give the signal (probably late in the next release cycle) that we are completely happy with the plcolorbar API. Meanwhile, if you are curious about what plcolorbar can currently do, please run examples 16 and 33 with the -colorbar option. Hazen, please note (as with pllegend) that the bounding box size for plcolorbar is critically dependent on good results from plstrl for the physical length (in mm) of the string. Those plstrl results are currently outstanding for the cairo devices thanks to your previous efforts. How is it going with your project to obtain good string-length results for the qt devices using a similar technique to what you used in the cairo case? 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 __________________________ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ EditLive Enterprise is the world's most technically advanced content authoring tool. Experience the power of Track Changes, Inline Image Editing and ensure content is compliant with Accessibility Checking. http://p.sf.net/sfu/ephox-dev2dev _______________________________________________ Plplot-devel mailing list Plplot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-devel
