better legends?

Programmers:

This was posted to the user's list today; has anybody out there written
a legend program that displays a continuous gradient?

From: Peter Briggs <pbriggs@laurel.ocs.mq.edu.au>
Message-Id: <199304280253.AA29676@laurel.ocs.mq.edu.au>
Subject: Q: Who has script for pretty legends?
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To: grassu-list@max.cecer.army.mil (Grass Users List)
Date: Wed, 28 Apr 1993 12:53:10 +1000 (EST)
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Dear Grass Users,

Has anybody written a shell script (Grass 4.0) that produces a
more attractive and flexible legend than d.legend seems capable
of?

For example, I have a d.e.m. that I am displaying as a
continuously graded grey-scale image (from 0m to 150m as 70 to 220 grey
intensity) and I would like, in a separate frame at the bottom or side,
to display a continuously graded legend labeled with elevations
at, say, 25m intervals.

Some sort of control over the portion of
the colour table to display in the legend would be nice, and
with 151 'separate categories' I don't want d.legend to label
every one and put a little box around it.

This seems like a thing that most everybody must want. Am I
missing something obvious? Any help is greatly appreciated.

Peter Briggs (The Relatively New and Inexperienced)
--
School of Earth Sciences email: pbriggs@laurel.ocs.mq.edu.au
Macquarie University phone: +61 2 805 8356
NSW 2109, Australia fax : +61 2 805 8428

I made a few minor changes in my version of d.legend to allow the user
to input a "thinning factor", so if thin=10 the categories shown in the
legend would be 0,10,20...

I agree that it would be nice if there were an option to allow a smooth
gradient legend - I'll post your request to grass programmers list,
maybe somebody has written such a version.

Bill