Suggestions needed for a new command

[Ethan M. <merritt@u.washington.edu>]

I am still struggling to create 3D plots with properly labeled
axes that intersect at the origin (Bug #1293118).
I have a patchset that mostly fixes things, but there a few missing pieces.

It adds a "zeroaxis" option for the Z axis, an option which has been
inexplicably limited to X and Y. It also tries to avoid printing tics and
labels in a different place from the axis they are supposed to label.

What I am missing is a clean way to do the following:

	set border 0	# turn off border, we'll draw axes instead
	set xzeroaxis
	set yzeroaxis
	set zzeroaxis      <== new command
	set xtics axis nomirror
	set ytics axis nomirror
	set ztics axis nomirror
	set ticslevel YMIN/(YMAX-YMIN)       <== problematic

There are two problems with the "set ticslevel" command.
1) It isn't easy to do in a script, since you don't necessarily
know in advance what are the values of YMIN and YMAX
2) It breaks anyhow if you later change zrange.

I want a new command that does the equivalent of the 8 commands above,
except that it bypasses the existing "set ticslevel" mechanism in
favor of pinning the X/Y plane at Z=0.

It's not clear to me whether this would fit in as a variant of
some existing command, or whether it would need a new one of its own.
Possibilities include

	set view axes
	set zeroaxis {something}
	set axes {<linetype>}

Other suggestions?


-- 
Ethan A Merritt       merritt@u.washington.edu
Biomolecular Structure Center
Mailstop 357742
University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195