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

[Andy Buckley]

On 04/05/11 15:57, Hendrik Hoeth wrote:
> 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.

Sorry, typo. How did that get there? Hmm.

> 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.

I agree.

>> 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.

Ok! Maybe dotted should be used rather than dashed as the second line
style in compare-plots if mc-errs are enabled.

>> Or something cleverer?
> 
> I'm not clever enough to have a better solution. Sorry.

I am disillusioned. I thought you had pstricks aswers for everything ;)

>> Any opposition to making rivet-mkhtml's default behaviour the same as
>> the compare-histos?
> 
> I'm all in favour for that.

Cool, I'll do that now. And will maybe do the
prefer-dotted-to-dashed-if-mcerrs thing in compare-histos, too, if
no-one complains first!

Andy

-- 
Dr Andy Buckley
SUPA Advanced Research Fellow
Particle Physics Experiment Group, University of Edinburgh

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