#259 Canvas terminal documentation imprecise

[MBaz]

The documentation for the canvas terminal states that, with the mousing option, a mouse tracking box is placed "underneath the plot". However, the box actually is placed to the left of the plot.

To reproduce, run these commands in gnuplot (I tested version 5.4 on Linux with Firefox 82.0.2:

set terminal canvas mousing
set output 'canvastest.html'
plot sin(x)
set output

and then load the file canvastest.html in a web browser.

As an additional note, it seems like the mousebox can be configured to a certain extent. For example, gnuplot's demo page uses gnuplot.zoomed = false; to disable the "text zoom" button. It would be very helpful to have full documentation of all available configuration options.

[Ethan Merritt]

My view on this is that the purpose of the canvas terminal in gnuplot is not to produce ready-made web pages, but rather to produce graphics that can be embedded in a web page created by other means. Yes the default "standalone" option does generate a minimal web page to serve as a minimal example of what you can do with the terminal output. The "webify.pl" script that constructs the online demo set is another starting point, serving as an example of how one might auto-generate more complex web pages with multiple graphics elements.

I think documenting the format of html web pages is way beyond the scope of the gnuplot user manual. You might start with this online guide: https://www.w3schools.com/
Or you might prefer to use some higher-level web-design tool. I have zero experience with that but I gather their are lots of them.

As to where the mouse tracking box appears, you can easily change that in the output html file using a text editor of your choice. The html file contains a table with two cells. As you note, the layout is one row containing 2 cells. The structure can be inspected in your web browser (see attached screenshot) with the corresponding part of the web page lighting up as you mouse over the html source element. If you want to reformat the table to be 2 rows with 1 cell each, edit the structure so that

<table>
    <tr>
        <td> ... mouse box ... </td>
        <td> ... plot ... < /td>
    </tr>
</table>

instead looks like this

<table>
  <tr>
    <td> ... plot ... </td>
   </tr>
   <tr>
     <td> ... mouse box ... </td>
   </tr>
</table>