improving axes property behavior for the gnuplot backend

[Ben Abbott]

On Nov 15, 2008, at 4:43 AM, David Bateman wrote:

> Ben Abbott wrote:
>> As implemented today, the gnuplot backend does not properly respect  
>> the "outerposition", "position" and "activepositionproperty"  
>> properties for the axes. For the gnuplot backend to do so a rather  
>> signficant change to __go_draw_axes__.m is needed.
>> I'm thinking about taking that on. Before begining I wanted solicit  
>> comments/concernts/objections.
>> In order to ensure that the "position" and "outerpostion" are  
>> rendered properly and are consistent across different terminals, I  
>> suspect it will also be necessary to replace the gnuplot x/y/zlabel  
>> commands with
>> set label {<tag>} {"<label text>"}
>>    {at {<system>} <x>, {<system>} <y> {,{<system>} <z>}}
>>    {left | center | right}
>>    {norotate | rotate {by <degrees>}}
>>    {font "<name>{,<size>}"}
>>    {noenhanced}
>>    {front | back}
>>    {textcolor <colorspec>}
>>    {point <pointstyle> | nopoint}
>>    {offset <offset>}
>> Again, before I begin does anyone have any comments/concerns/ 
>> objections?
>> Ben
>> p.s. ticklabels might also be explicitly positioned by Octave, but  
>> that
>> can wait.
>
> Yes the labels and legends pose a problem in getting this right..  
> Essentially, the intelligence on the placement of the labels need to  
> be moved from gnuplot to Octave. The "set margin" commands  that  
> were added  recently to __go_draw_axes__ have to be kept to allow  
> plot alignment with subplot and plotyy to be respected. This  
> essentially means that gnuplot backend always uses the Position axis  
> property and its upto Octave to ensure that Position is updated wrt  
> OuterPosition and the labeling.

David, regarding the "set margin" commands ... after looking over the  
situation, I'm inclined to use the "set size XX,YY" command to specify  
the axes "position", and then use "set label ...." to generate the  
axis labels, title, and ticklabels. Is there any reason such an  
approach will not work

btw, I've not looked into the requirements of 3D plots, and was  
thinking about leaving that alone.

Ben