desired features for gp backend?

[Ben Abbott]

On Thursday, June 18, 2009, at 10:24AM, "Daniel J Sebald" <daniel.sebald at ieee.org> wrote:
>John W. Eaton wrote:
>> On 17-Jun-2009, Daniel J Sebald wrote:
>> 
>> | What is important in my mind is an inroad to using
>> | more powerful features of the plotting engine.  Why limit oneself to
>> | the capabilities of Matlab?  A few hidden options having meaning
>> | only to the plotting engine seems plausible.
>> 
>> By "the plotting engine" do you mean "a particular plotting engine"?
>> Since there can be more than one, then it seems to me these "hidden
>> options" will cause portability problems for code.  You say the
>> options are "hidden", but if they are available, people will use them,
>> then complain later if we make some other plotting engine the default,
>> or if they try to share scripts with people who use an alternative
>> plotting engine that doesn't handle the special properties they are
>> using.
>
>True, but that's the user's problem to deal with.  The situation is the same if I write code dependent on some function 'this_is_a_long_function_name(...)' and don't make that function available in the Octave distribution script tree.
>
>Maybe it is easiest just to write something like
>
>send_text_to_gnuplot_graphics_pipe(fig, 'set foo')
>
>where internally this function locates the appropriate pipe and simply sends some more text.
>
>Dan

Dan, with regards to gnuplot, what might you try to "set" that would change the rendering?

Ben