#243 New layout engine to manage inter-plot spacing and margins
There's a long standing feature request to have the layout engine deal with a number of problems with the layout. The plots will scoot in when colorbars are added, but long titles and turning off x axis labels has no effect on the inter-plot spacing, it's always 4 ems.
This wiki page specifies the new layout: http://autoplot.org/developer.autolayout
Initially this will be a code that is manually run, but I would like to to eventually be run continuously when autolayout is on, so turning off an xaxis would immediately result in the gap disappearing.
See also:
* https://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=3092413&group_id=199733&atid=970682
* https://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=3030658&group_id=199733&atid=970682
* https://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=3042070&group_id=199733&atid=970682
This is coded and seems to be working well. I'll continue to test it, but I will plan on it being in the 2011 final release.
Some new logic is needed so that single-em rows, as would be used with an events bar, are preserved. I was working on a script for Bill at Iowa where the events bar height would shift around, sometimes making it unusable. The vertical position of such a row should be "%50,%50+1em" and its height will be preserved.
Also, the RPWG at Iowa wants to add arbitrary components to the canvas, and the layout manager should respect these, even if it doesn't know what they are. I think it does, as long as the bounds are a simple function of the row and column.
Note this was done quite a while ago. I'm closing this now. See also
See also: https://sourceforge.net/p/autoplot/feature-requests/811/
where we are revisiting this.