axis manipulations in plots are unnecessarily restrictive

[Rob Mahurin]

On Mar 6, 2008, at 1:22 PM, John W. Eaton wrote:

> On  6-Mar-2008, Rob Mahurin wrote:
>
> | The change to "graphics handle" plot manipulation has made some
> | tweaks to gnuplot's default axes impossible.  I have (somewhat)
> | rewritten them in the new language and would be glad to see them
> | officially supported in a later version of Octave.
>
> | 	# eliminate the tics, but keep the box
> | 	set(gca,"visible","lines");
>
> Try
>
>   set (gca, "xtick", [], "ytick", []);
>
> instead.

That's half of what I want.  But I more frequently use tics without  
lines (see attached example).  Is there a way to do that, apart from  
my patch?

> | A statement like
> | 	set(gca,"thickness",0);
> | should send "set border lw 0;\n" to the gnuplot backend.
>
> I think the correct property name for this is "linewidth", and it has
> already been added to the current development sources, though nothing
> is done with the new property in the __go_draw_axes__ function yet, so
> I just made the attached change.

Thanks.

> | It should be possible to use produce formatted ticklabels, e.g.	
> | 	set(gca,"xticklabels","%.3f");
> | Until Octave implements this, the backend's formatting options  
> should
> | be available.
>
> I don't think Matlab's ticklabels properties have this feature, though
> it might be a useful to have it.
>
> The goal is not to expose every feature of a particular graphics
> backend, but to provide Matlab compatible graphics functionality.  We
> think that's what most users of Octave want and expect, so that's what
> we are aiming for.  Eventually, I doubt that gnuplot will be the
> default backend because.  If you want all the features of gnuplot, I
> suggest you write your data to a file and use gnuplot directly.

I understand that, and I'd expect that in the long term such an  
option would be implemented entirely by Octave --- that is, a call like

	set(gca,"xticklabels","%.3f","formatpercents","true")

would generate a set of text labels that get sent to whatever  
plotting backend the user has chosen.  I don't have any attachment to  
gnuplot's formatting options, but I think this functionality belongs  
in a data analysis program.

Thanks for maintaining such a terribly useful tool.

Rob

-- 
Rob Mahurin
Dept. of Physics & Astronomy
University of Tennessee 	phone: 865 207 2594
Knoxville, TN 37996     	email: rob at utk.edu
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