printing figures with development version

[Ben Abbott]

On Mar 28, 2009, at 12:17 PM, John W. Eaton wrote:

> On 27-Mar-2009, Ben Abbott wrote:
>
> | What you see is intended. You'll need to adjust the figure's paper  
> properties. Specifically, "papersize" and "paperpositon"
> |
> | If you'd like an 6.4in x 4.8in eps file
> |
> | figure (1)
> | clf
> | plot (randn (50, 1))
> | set (gcf, "paperunits", "inches"); # the default is "inches"
> | paper_size = [6.4, 4.8];
> | set (gcf, "papersize", paper_size)
> | set (gcf, "papertype", "<custom>")
> | set (gcf, "paperposition", [0, 0, paper_size])
> | print (gcf, strcat ("figtest", version, ".eps"), "-depsc")
> |
> | This will be much simpler once the all listeners for these  
> properties are in place.
>
> If I print to a .eps file, I expect that the bounding box of the
> figure will be fairly tight around the figure so that it may be
> included directly in another document without a lot of extra
> whitespace surrounding it.  I think that is most useful.  I also don't
> expect to have to fiddle with paper properties to make that happen
> (how would I know that 6.4x4.8 inches are good values?).
>
> Earlier versions of Octave did not add extra whitespace around the
> figure, so I think we will see a lot of complaints about this change
> if it escapes into a stable version.
>
> What is the motivation for the change?  Is there something good about
> this design choice that I'm missing?  If the change is purely for
> Matlab compatibility, then I think this is one of those things that we
> should not copy.
>
> jwe


The current implementation produces compatible behavior ... except  
that the BoundingBox defined by gnuplot is not tight, and the one  
produced by Matlab is.

The current implementation may be modified to obtain the desired  
result by changing the papersize for the eps output to ...

	papersize = paperposition + [50, 50, 100, 100]/72;

Where the paperunits are implied to be "inches". The 50pt border is a  
gnuplot feature.

I'll prepare a changeset.

Ben