Strange behavior when printing plots in eps

[Moreno Marzolla]

Hello everybody,

I am experiencing a different behavior of Octave 3.2.3 and 3.6.1 when 
saving plots as a b/w eps file. Before submitting a bug report I would 
like to check if this is intended.

Consider the following code:

x = 1:10;
plot(x,3*sqrt(x),";First;",x,2*sqrt(x),";Second;",x,sqrt(x),";Third;");
print("test.eps","-deps2","-mono","-debug");

Using Octave 3.2.3 as shipped with ubuntu 10.04, I get that the three 
curves have different linestyle (solid, dashed, dotted). Using octave 
3.6.1 (which I compiled myself, again under ubuntu 10.04), I get all 
solid lines both with the gnuplot and with the fltk backend. At the 
moment I cannot check if this happens with a recent tip also.

Looking at octave-print-commands.log which is produced by the "-debug" 
option above, I see that Octave 3.2.3 inserts this:

...
set style line 1 default;
set style line 1 linewidth 0.500000 pointsize 1.000000;
set style line 2 default;
set style line 2 linewidth 0.500000 pointsize 1.000000;
set style line 3 default;
set style line 3 linewidth 0.500000 pointsize 1.000000;
...

while Octave 3.6.1 inserts this:

...
set style line 1 default;
set style line 1 linetype 1 linewidth 0.500000;
set style line 2 default;
set style line 2 pointsize 2.000000;
set style line 2 default;
set style line 2 linetype 1 linewidth 0.500000;
set style line 3 default;
set style line 3 pointsize 2.000000;
set style line 3 default;
set style line 3 linetype 1 linewidth 0.500000;
set style line 4 default;
set style line 4 pointsize 2.000000;
...

The problem seems caused by the fact that all styles are defined with 
"linetype 1" (there are also redundant "set style line X default").
I can get the old behavior by manually setting the line styles as follows:

x = 1:10;
plot(x,3*sqrt(x),"-;First;",x,2*sqrt(x),"--;Second;",x,sqrt(x),":;Third;");
print("test.eps","-deps2","-mono","-debug");

Is this behavior intended?

Thanks,

Moreno.

--
Moreno Marzolla
EMail: address@hidden
WWW  : http://www.moreno.marzolla.name/