Default Plot Characteristics, was Re: [OctDev] zplane.m marker size

[Daniel J Sebald]

Simon Schwarz wrote:
> In the version of zplane.m the marker size was set explicitly to 2 I
> just changed this value to 12 and added a parameter for it.
>
> I just tried to remove the markersize code - it works also. The markers
> are tiny but bigger than before.

That's odd.  Perhaps a marker size of 2 is some legacy code not updated to fit the new Octave graphics scheme.  I just tried 

id = plot(1:10, 'ro')
get(id)

and found a marker size of 6.  I can't find exactly where the default 
properties are set searching through the Octave source.

Anyone on the maintainers list familiar with graphics, should scripts be 
setting any absolute sizes anymore?  Or just relative (e.g., divide by 2, 
multiply by 3)?


> So maybe it's a good way to add a markersize option. But if it is left
> empty use the defaults?

Perhaps.  However, if a plot is the main result of the zplane() command, the 
output of the plot command could be returned as the output of zplane().  Then 
one would have access to all the plot properties, not just marker size.  One 
could use gcf() just as easily too.

 zplane();
 id = gcf();
 set(id, 'markersize', 1234)

If you want to go with the markersize option in zplane, I'd say pass all unused 
options onto the plot routine, not just markersize.

Dan