Bug#778318: gnuplot5: when using the pdfcairo terminal, lines are much thicker than with gnuplot4

[Anton Gladky]

tags 778318 +wontfix
thanks

Hi Vincent,

thanks for bugreport. Gnuplot5 is not quite Gnuplot4, so some
incompatibilities are possible. There is an answer from Gnuplot
author:

===============
I agree that the default line thickness for pdfcairo is thicker in
version 5 than it was in version 4, but do not consider this a bug.
Pretty much all the linetype/dash/color properties of default
linetypes were reworked in version 5, and this change was a primary
reason for bumping the gnuplot major version from 4.x to 5.x

In the case of pdfcairo I think the change was made so that the
visual appearance would be the same if the same gnuplot commands
are run through  "set term pngcairo" and "set term pdfcairo".
In version 4 the lines appeared much thinner in the png output
than in the pdf output.  So the change was an intentional part of
a larger set of changes.
===============

Regards

Anton


2015-02-13 15:43 GMT+01:00 Vincent Lefevre <vincent at vinc17.net>:
> Package: gnuplot5
> Version: 5.0.0~rc+dfsg2-1
> Severity: important
>
> When using the pdfcairo terminal, lines are much thicker than with
> gnuplot4, so that old plot code is not compatible with gnuplot5,
> though this incompatibility is not listed on
>
>   http://www.gnuplot.info/ReleaseNotes_5_0.html
>
> This can be seen with:
>
> for i in 4 5
> do
>   gnuplot$i <<EOF
> set terminal pdfcairo lw 10
> set output 'out$i.pdf'
> plot '-' using 1:2 t '' with line
> 0 0
> 10 10
> e
> EOF
> done
>
> when both gnuplot4 and gnuplot5 are installed.
>
> I've attached the produced out4.pdf and out5.pdf files.
>
> Getting too thick lines is annoying in some cases as details can be
> lost (or become less visible).
>
> -- System Information:
> Debian Release: 8.0
>   APT prefers unstable
>   APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'testing'), (500, 'stable'), (1, 'experimental')
> Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
> Foreign Architectures: i386
>
> Kernel: Linux 3.16.0-4-amd64 (SMP w/8 CPU cores)
> Locale: LANG=POSIX, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
> Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
> Init: sysvinit (via /sbin/init)
>
> Versions of packages gnuplot5 depends on:
> ii  gnuplot5-qt [gnuplot5-nox]  5.0.0~rc+dfsg2-1
>
> gnuplot5 recommends no packages.
>
> Versions of packages gnuplot5 suggests:
> ii  gnuplot5-doc  5.0.0~rc+dfsg2-1
>
> -- no debconf information
>
> --
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