improving axes property behavior for the gnuplot backend

[Ben Abbott]

On Nov 16, 2008, at 12:10 PM, David Bateman wrote:

> Ben Abbott wrote:
>
>> 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
>
> It won't work because the "size" specified by gnuplot is the size of  
> the plot and its labels. So if you use "size" and not the "margin"  
> commands, it becomes impossible to align plots in subplots or in  
> plotyy. Frankly, if we want aligned subplots and plotyy commands I  
> see no way around this..

Ok. I was a bit confused by gnuplot's (v 4.3) description of what size  
XX,YY did.

----------------------------
set size <XX>, <YY> scales the plot itself relative to the size of the  
canvas. Scale values less than 1 will cause the plot to not fill the  
entire canvas. Scale values larger than 1 will cause only a portion of  
the plot to fit on the canvas. Please be aware that setting scale  
values larger than 1 may cause problems on some terminal types.

The major exception to this convention is the PostScript driver, which  
by default continues to act as it has in earlier versions. Be warned  
that the next version of gnuplot may change the default behaviour of  
the PostScript driver as well.
----------------------------

When I tried using it, I found for the x11, aqua, and wxt terminals  
that "the plot itself" excluded the ticklabels, axislabels, and title.  
I hadn't tried it out postscript, which apparently does something  
different (I don't know what), but also appears to be one of the  
better implementations.

In any event, when I get to rendering the axes, I'll use gnuplot's  
"set margin".

Ben