Re: bug in terminals affected by 'set size'

[Aapo L. <aap...@gm...>]

On Thu, 2005-10-06 at 09:42 +0200, Juergen Wieferink wrote:
> I'd like the option to set it using arbitrary dimensions.  Something
> like
> 
> set term post eps size 8cm, 5cm
> set term post eps size 5in, 3in
> 
> really should be possible.  Personally, I don't see any need for an
> explicit bounding box specification.  But if someone does, I'm fine
> with it -- as long as there is also some "size" option.

Yes, that would be a good thing.  One thing that Gnuplot is very good at
is its ability to produce very clean and good-looking plots for
inclusion in documents.  Unfortunately, it's little difficult to have
plot canvas in an exact arbitrary size, as you described.  Of course,
scaling of the image is not feasible, as linewidths and font sizes in
the document wouldn't be consistent after the scaling.

The obvious workaround (which works for me anyway) is to fiddle around
with the size parameter, which as discussed can quite freely be choosed
in range [0,1].  But for a newcomer it surely is irritating that you
can't set the explicit bounding box in the unit of your choice.  That
makes integration with LaTeX documents a little more difficult, but not
impossible.

One difficult thing is a0 posters: it is not possible to make big enough
eps images with Gnuplot to be included into an a0 poster.  Of course,
there is a workaround; one just plots everything in smaller scale in
Gunplot (a4 vs a0), and scales the result back into a0.  However, the
calculations with font sizes and linewidths are something that a user
shouldn't need to do.  Many fellow students around here rather use
Origin (a windows GUI driven plotting program), because it seems not to
have such limitation.  However, Origin is not a solution for me, because
a) Origin eps files are crap b) usually Origin plots look hideous c) I
rather use Linux d) I'm (usually) able to workaround the Gnuplot
oddities.

Anyway, because there are different paper sizes possible in postscript
and because eps figures are of different size by their nature, there
really should be such a size option as you suggested.  But I think its
name should not be "size", because the "size" is already a reserved
keyword for "set" and it would cause confusion.  How would e.g. 

set term post eps canvas 8cm, 5cm
set term post canvas a0

sound?  Is this kind of behaviour possible to implement for just one
terminal driver without touching others?  This way there would be no
need to change the "set size" behaviour at all, and by choosing default
a4 size canvas for postscript, there would be perfect backward
compatibility. 

							Aapo