[Rivet] make-plots (effectively) doesn't show dashed lines in --mc-errs mode

Hendrik Hoeth hendrik.hoeth at cern.ch
Wed May 4 15:57:02 BST 2011


Hi Andy,

Thus spake Andy Buckley (andy.buckley at ed.ac.uk):

> there is often no distinction between solid and dashed lines of the
> same colour: see the example PDF at
> http://users.hepforge.org/~buckley/d06-x03-y01.pdf

Looking at your directory I downloaded d02-x03-y01.pdf instead. First
problem: There are too many lines in that plot. Reduce it to four MC
lines, and all your problems are solved. Or switch off the error bars
(which are so small that they don't even show up in this plot).

This is not a joke, I'm dead serious about those two comments. Just
imagine having MC results with larger error bars -- you don't want six
overlapping and interfering error bars anyway. Error bars are fine if
you have one or maybe two lines in the plot. Anything beyond that and
the picture becomes way too busy. In my book it's either many lines or
error bars, but not both simultaneously.

> Is it possible to tweak make-plots' pstricks magic to start dashed
> line patterns e.g. 1/3 of the way into the dash pattern so that the
> dash gap will appear in each bin?

This wouldn't solve the problem in this specific plot. Have a look at
the legend. The dashes are longer than the bin width, so you'd only have
a short line at the left edge of each bin. What you could do is change
the style to dotted (with a <filename>:"LineStyle=dotted" on the command
line), or change the dash size using the LineDash option in a similar
way.

> Or something cleverer?

I'm not clever enough to have a better solution. Sorry.

> Any opposition to making rivet-mkhtml's default behaviour the same as
> the compare-histos?

I'm all in favour for that.

Cheers,

    Hendrik

-- 
The minimum number of planes one should own is one. The correct number
is n+1, where n is the number of planes currently owned. This equation
may also be re-written as s-1, where s is the number of planes owned
that would result in separation from your partner.       -- Veluminati


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