[Kst] Re: branches/work/kst/portto4/kst

[Nicolas Brisset]

Hi Barth,

I'm not answering your other, more recent mail since you've apparently understood my wishes very well. So I'll just hope for some support from others to convince you completely :-)
Only shortly to the question regarding manual legends: if the name is not auto, I see no problem in taking the manually entered name for the legend entry. If the user wants a unit, then he can type it in.

So, with that out of the way, now some comments to the labels...
> Some modifications to the label system.  I think this is an
> improvement,  but there are still
> some issues.  To fix them requires a significant (but simple) api
> change, which I am ready to do.
I don't know what si still coming, but at this stage I am not completely happy. Sorry to disappoint you, but I liked it better before (only the top labels disturbed me), at least when there is only one curve per plot.

To be a bit more specific (aka "constructive criticism"), here are some observations of a plot with the GOTEX[...].nc netCDF sample I like to use for test purposes, plotting 25 curves (5x5 grid):
- the X-axis label is along the x axis when I use time_offset (no unit) => OK
- the X-axis has no label but only the unit when I use seconds (unit: s) => BAD
- the Y-axis has only the unit, and the Y-axis label is displayed along the top X-axis => not very consistent, I much preferred the previous way with label + unit on the left
- the top label of a plot is often closer to the unit of the above plot than to its plot => confusing, and there seems to be lots of free space between the top axis and the top label so we could/should improve that
- there is a lot of empty space between the units and the figures (see recent mail with a screenshot, nothing new here)

It's a bit late for me to think about all the options, but maybe some hints to possible improvements:
- display the units at the end of the axes (above the left axis for y unit, at the right end of the X axis for the x unit) - direction should be the same as label numbers in that case
- always display the y label along the y axis and the x label along the x axis, or else in a legend (yeah, I know: I'm repeating myself here: for more than one curve, use only legends and not the top label!)

Well, it looks like I don't have so many new ideas. So let's wait and see what others think about that... Maybe I could also do some mockups. Should I?

Nicolas

P.S.: your idea to have a struct for the implementation sounds rather good to me.