Re: Argh: Why are arrows clipped to the graph?

[Daniel J S. <dan...@ie...>]

Harald Harders wrote:
> On Fri, 11 Nov 2005, Ethan A Merritt wrote:
> 
> 
>>On Friday 11 November 2005 05:11 pm, Daniel J Sebald wrote:
>>
>>>I don't know if it is even that complicated.  Certainly one can do that.
>>> But I'm constantly making the mistake of creating a plot half off
>>>screen in ghostview, then I expand out to some other page size beside
>>>"encapsulated" and there is the rest of the plot.
>>
>>And right there you have the reason why the PostScript driver is
>>different from all the others - it let's you draw "off the screen".
>>If you come to rely on that, you will eventually find that some
>>other driver will be extremely unhappy that you are trying to
>>draw outside the pre-allocated space.
>>
>>
>>>>set size 2,2
>>
>>    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>>Don't do that.
> 
> 
> Oh no, not again. For all postscript terminals, it's the only way to
> produce large plots. And for some other terminals, it also works as scale
> factor for the canvas. If you are allowed to reduce the canvas size using
> 'set size 0.7,0.7' you also have to be allowed to increase it by using
> 'set size 2.0,2.0'. And to maintain compatibility (to the old code where
> no clipping was done in most terminals) we will have to handle sizes above
> 1, too.

I'm sort of in agreement with you, Harald.  [My pipe dream has always been to find the time to write a document "How to layout plots in gnuplot".]  But I would say I think there are two distinct concepts here, one the size of the plot with respect to the convas and another the size of the canvas with respect to the plotting device's inherent coordinate system.

For example, with PostScript, if I were to make the _canvas_ size 2.0,2.0 without changing plot size, what I'd expect is font size, line thickness, etc. to "shrink" in a relativistic way.  Similarly, if I set _plot_ size 0.5,0.5 without changing canvas size I'd expect font size, line thickness, etc. to "expand" in a relativistic way.  Mantra?  Clip to the canvas, not the plot?  Should "subplots" have a canvas size too?  Am I confusing matters worse than already are?

Dan