Re: bug in terminals affected by 'set size'

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

On Tuesday 04 October 2005 01:12 pm, Harald Harders wrote:
> 
> And I do not see a reason why gnuplot shall not be able to generate plots
> with a size larger than 1 x 1. 

Because "1 x 1" means "the full plotting area".
By definition, if you plot outside that area then you are asking for
trouble.

> If it is valid to reduce the size of a plot 
> by using 'set size' before 'set terminal' (which has been agreed in a
> former discussion where I complained about cropped arrows in splots larger
> than 1 x 1), an increase of the size to a measure larger than 1 x 1 should
> also be possible.

No.  See above.  It makes perfect sense to ask for the current plot
to fill only 1/4 of the plotting area.  That's the normal use of
multiplot mode.  You are making, say, 4 plots on the same page, and
each one should occupy 1/4 of the area. Asking to fill *more* than the
plotting area makes no sense and should not be allowed IMHO.

> I still do not understand the arguments why a plot larger than 1 x 1
> should not be used. It seems ignorant to me. The bug also does not apply
> to pixel based plots if you want to have the same font sizes and
> linewidths in two different plots with a different size.

I do not follow which side of the argument you are pursuing in these
sentences.

Are you proposing that we change the meaning of "size" for pixel-based
terminals, so that in the future it would mean "use this as a multiplier
for # of pixels, all font sizes, line widths, point sizes, etc"?
That would make some sense, since it would effectively be changing the
resolution of the output image. But it would be a major change from the
way things work now.  It also does exactly the opposite of what you
said you wanted PostScript output to do in the case of scaling up the
output size.

Could someone explain to me what is the actual use intended for one
of these larger-than-full-page plots?  Is the idea to make a 
posterboard-sized plot using PostScript?  But in that case you 
probably *do* want to scale up the line widths and fonts, so that
they remain readable at normal poster-viewing distance.


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