2008/7/16 Ted Harding <Ted.Harding@manchester.ac.uk>:

> Hi Folks,
> I'd be grateful for good suggestions about the following.
>
> I'm plotting a family of (X,Y) curves (for different levels
> of another variable, Z): say 6 curves in all but could be
> more or less -- it's a rather variables situation.
>
> I'd like to label each curve with the value of Z that it
> corresponds to.
>
> But people out there must have faced it, and I'd be grateful
> for their own feedback from the coal-face!
>
Isn't this why we have colour vision? Just use 6 different colours and a
legend. Or use linestyles and colours. Trying to do neat labelling along
general lines like contour does is going to fail in edge cases such as if
two lines are very close together. Contour can be fairly sure the lines will
have sensible spacing unless it's mapping cliffs.

 I looked at the underlying C code for contour a while back with a view to
using the algorithms in another package, but I gave up pretty quickly. The
generated contour lines and labels are quite beautiful, but the code gave me
a headache.

Barry

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