Re: plot style changes when printed to files

[John W. Eaton]

On  1-Nov-2007, Ana Rakonjac wrote:

| On 11/1/07, Evan <address@hidden> wrote:
| > another style change when printing is that saving plot made by
| > errorbar with colors will produce a plot with the color of black.
| 
| Could this be a problem with printer drivers rather than with Octave?
| I've had no problems. However, I save my figures as PNGs.

Yes, as far as I know, these problems happen because not all gnuplot
terminal drivers produce the same output for the same commands.  So I
don't see a reasonable way to fix this problem in Octave.  There is no
way we are going to try to embed terminal-driver specific information
in Octave in an attempt to "fix" this problem only to have our fixes
break when/if the gnuplot terminal drivers become more uniform.

A year ago, Octave's plotting system was almost completely
incompatible with Matlab's.  We set out to fix that, and I think the
current solution is a big step in that direction, but it is clearly
not complete or perfect.  You are now seeing one of the problems that
is quite difficult to fix with gnuplot.  But for at least the short
term, we will keep using gnuplot (it was the easiest thing for me to
use when I started to revise Octave's plotting system).  I think
things will improve in the future, but it will be after 3.0 before
problems like the one you are pointing out are fixed.  Please have
some patience.

Thanks,

jwe