SED navigation bar go to SED home page go to Dataplot home page go to NIST home page SED Home Page SED Staff SED Projects SED Products and Publications Search SED Pages
Dataplot Vol 1 Vol 2

MARGIN COLOR

Name:
    MARGIN COLOR
Type:
    Plot Control Command
Purpose:
    Specifies the color of the margin (the margin is the region outside the frame) on subsequent plots. The margin is "painted" whenever a subsequent screen erasure takes place.

    Dataplot provides two methods for specifying colors.

    1. Colors can be defined by name (or by the corresponding index). Dataplot adopted it's named colors from the X11 project. Currently, 162 named colors and 100 levels of grayscale are supported. Grayscale can be specified with either G0, G1, ..., G100 (or -1, -2, ..., -100). Many older devices support only a limited number of colors. For these devices, unsupported colors will be mapped to one of the available colors. To specify a named color, see Syntax 1.

    2. Most modern graphics devices support full RGB (RedBlueGreen) color. You can alternatively specify RGB colors by entering three integer values to represent the Red, Green and Blue components, respectively. These values should be in the range 0 to 255.

    When setting the margin color, Dataplot first checks if the device supports RGB colors. If not, the named color will be used. If the device does support RGB color, Dataplot will check if an RGB color has been specified. If yes, then that RGB color is used. If not, the named color will be used.

    To see the list of supported named colors (with the associated index number), see

    https://www.itl.nist.gov/div898/software/dataplot/refman1/ch11/homepage.htm

Syntax 1:
    MARGIN COLOR <color>
    where <color> specifies the desired margin color.
Syntax 2:
    MARGIN RGB COLOR <ired> <igreen> <iblue>
    where <ired> specifies the red component of the margin color;
                <igreen> specifies the green component of the margin color;
    and      <iblue> specifies the blue component of the margin color.

    The components should be integer values in the range 0 - 255. To turn off the RGB color, set the components to -1 (any negative value will work and if any of the three components is negative the RGB color will be turned off).

Examples:
    MARGIN COLOR GREEN
    MARGIN COLOR YELLOW
    MARGIN RGB COLOR 90 167 102
Note:
    When you enter the BACKGROUND COLOR command, this will also set the MARGIN COLOR to the same color. If you want the MARGIN COLOR to be different than the BACKGROUND COLOR, then enter the MARGIN COLOR after the BACKGROUND COLOR command.
Note:
    The MARGIN COLOR command with no arguments reverts the margin color to default.
Default:
    White
Synonyms:
    None
Related Commands: Applications:
    Presentation Graphics
Implementation Date:
    Pre-1987 2021/03: Support for RGB margin color
Program:
     
    background color cyan
    background rgb color 110 205 65
    margin color yellow
    margin rgb color 90 167 102
    .
    line thickness 0.5
    line color yellow
    title case asis
    title offset 2
    title Sample Plot
    label case asis
    x1label x
    y1label x**2
    .
    plot x**2 for x = 1 1 9
        
    plot generated by sample program

Privacy Policy/Security Notice
Disclaimer | FOIA

NIST is an agency of the U.S. Commerce Department.

Date created: 03/30/2021
Last updated: 03/30/2021

Please email comments on this WWW page to alan.heckert@nist.gov.