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# Plot Colors

Several color schemes are used in Plot.

Before any drawing is made, the backcolor is applied to the plot box. The axes, frame, ticmarks, labels and titles are then drawn in the forecolor.

Text specified with the `text`, `textc` and `textr` commands is drawn with the textcolor.

Data is colored in two ways, depending on plot type:

- where each data item is plotted in a single color (e.g. line plots), the items are drawn with the itemcolor
- where a data item is banded and requires several colors to plot, (e.g. density plots), it is drawn with the bandcolor.

The edges of filled-in shapes are drawn with the edgecolor (usually black).

Backcolor, forecolor, textcolor and edgecolor are single colors.

Itemcolor and bandcolor are lists of colors. Itemcolor typically contains quite distinctive colors to distinguish the different data items. Bandcolor is typically a graduated scale of colors, for example to indicate height. Typical lists of colors are defined in ~system\classes\plot\plotdefs.ijs.

The term color can also be used as an abbreviation to specify the itemcolor or the bandcolor depending on plot type. This is convenient for simple plots where only one plot type is being drawn.

For example:

`pd 'textcolor red'` | single color for text
`pd 'itemcolor blue,red,green'` | list of colors for items
`pd 'bandcolor bgclr'` | list of colors in color band
`pd 'color blue,red'` | item or band colors (depends on plot type)

The plotdefs.ijs script defines several color schemes, for example:

- `STDCLR` is the color scheme used by default
- `RBCLR`, `RGCLR`, `RGBCLR` and `BGCLR` are color schemes that are appropriate for 3D surface plots. Here `RBCLR` is a scale of 64 steps from red to blue, etc.
- `GRAYSCALE` is gray shades in 100 steps from black to white.

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