This is a collection of thoughts on AIDA Styles and on their use in the new plotter.

Style Store

This is an object that can save and retrieve styles from a store (xml file on disk, database table). The basic xml style definition is the AIDA one. Next to the style itself we also identified the need to define #Style Rules that should also be saved/retrieved to/from the store.

Style Rules

It should be possible to define rules on how to attach a style to a particular plot object. It should be possible to apply rules to:

• object type: hep.aida.IHistogram1D, org.myproject.MyData1D
• object path: with path expressions like "MC/**"
• plot order: a specific order position, 0, 7 or a cyclical recurrence (3) -> every third plot
• action: like printing (plots for printing might require less details)
• category: "experiment=GLAST, quality=preliminary"