improving axes property behavior for the gnuplot backend

[Ben Abbott]

On Nov 17, 2008, at 5:01 AM, dbateman at fladenmuller.org wrote:

> On Sun, Nov 16, 2008 at 11:31:21PM -0500, Ben Abbott wrote:
>>
>> 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 ???ll the
>> entire canvas. Scale values larger than 1 will cause only a portion  
>> of
>> the plot to ???t 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".
>
> Ok, then this is a change in the behavior of "set size" command with
> gnuplot 4.3.. The old behavior was as I described.. So eventually we  
> can use
> "set size" as you suggest, but not yet.

While working on this  I found a gnuplot bug.

	https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=102055&aid=2345000&group_id=2055

I haven't looked into the detail, but gnuplot >4.2.4 may not function  
properly with existing released of Octave. As I'm planning to focus on  
Octave > 3.1 I thought I'd mention it so that others can be aware and  
look out for any problems which might arise.

Ben