Problem with appearance of plots

[Ben Abbott]

On Feb 17, 2009, at 5:10 AM, Lennart O wrote:

> Ben Abbott wrote:
>>
>> On Feb 16, 2009, at 6:29 PM, Lennart O wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> Hi I'm having a problem with plots that are not very pretty. It's
>>> almost like
>>> an old version of gnuplot is being used. The result looks very
>>> crude. I
>>> should mention that I am using Octave 3.0.1 on Ubuntu 8.10. I took
>>> some
>>> screenshots to show what I mean.
>>>
>>> Plot with Octave:
>>> http://www.nabble.com/file/p22048113/octave.png
>>>
>>> Plot with Gnuplot:
>>> http://www.nabble.com/file/p22048113/gnuplot.png
>>>
>>> Any idea how to fix this? Is it a problem with the Ubuntu package or
>>> do I
>>> need to change some settings in Octave?
>>>
>>> ps. Sorry about the images being so large.
>>
>> Octave is telling gnuplot to use the x11 terminal, and when you run
>> gnuplot directly it is using the wxt terminal.
>>
>> Try ...
>>
>> 	$ export GNUTERM=wxt
>> 	$ octave
>>
>> ... and then do some plots.
>>
>> Ben
>>
> Thank you very much, entering that into the terminal did the trick.  
> Now I
> just need to figure out how to change which numbers are printed on the
> axises, theres' not enough room for them when doing a sublot. But  
> that can
> be done with gnuplot syntax directly in the m-file, right?

I think you're referring to the 2.1.x version of octave. Presently,  
when using subplot, there are problems with the positioning of the  
tick marks, axes labels, and titles.

If you are referring to the horizontal spacing of the x-axis tick- 
marks and tick-labels, you can change the defaults by

	set (hax, 'xtick', xticks)

where hax is the handle to the axes and xticks is a vector containing  
values for where you'd like the tick-mark labels placed.

> Also, how do I make the GNUTERM export more permanent so I don't  
> have to
> type it in every time I want to run Octave?

You can place it in the startup script for the shell that runs octave.  
For example, if  you are running a bash shell, place it is ~/.bashrc.

Ben

p.s. There is presently a 3.0.3 version available that fixes some bugs  
(soon there will be a 3.0.4). I recommend you update you installation.