Interactive terminals : behaviour on window resizing

[<tim...@en...>]

Hi !

I would like to discuss what is the expected behaviour of the interactive
terminals when the user resizes the windows.

The X11 terminal is resizing the plot by scaling everything on it except
the font size and the linewidths. Thus, if the user makes the window
smaller, ticks labels may overlap, the plot box gets closer to the
window's edges and may overlap the labels, etc.
If another plot command is issued, the ratio is kept, so that the positio=
n
of the box doesn't change for example.
If 'set term x11; replot' is issued, the window size seems to be probed,
updating term->xmax and term->ymax, and gnuplot updates the position of
the box, the labels, etc. according to the new size.

The Windows terminal behaves similarly, except that term->xmax and
term->ymax seem to be stored at once on startup only, so that 'set term
win; replot' won't change the layout of the plot at all.

I am now asking what is the best behaviour in these situations. The
purpose of gnuplot is to make the layout automatically, and to make it
good. So, to my mind, rescaling everything except the fontsize is kind of
strange, as it gives overlapping.

I can imagine two other possibilites for the plot behavior when the user
changes the window's size :

  1) really scale everything - including the font size
  2) don't scale anything and just display the plot centered in the windo=
w
if it is smaller than the window, and if it is bigger add scrollbars on
the edges of the window.

The first solution leads to another problem : what to do with the text
aspect ratio (height to width). Two possibilities again :
  a) scale the font size with the width of the window only and maintain
the proportion of the text. This will give overlapping labels again if
the user makes the height of the window smaller
  b) scale the whole text with the window, so the ratio width/height of
the text won't be constant

The second solution (don't scale anything) has the advantage to be faster=
,
as it has basically no complex operation at all to be done when the
window's size changes.
But what would the user have to do to make the plot fit again in the
window ? Just hit 'replot' ? Or 'set term wxt; replot' ? Click a toolbar
button called 'Fit plot to window' and then hit 'replot' ?

--Note that all these 'replot'-based solutions don't work with multiplot-=
-

Thanks for your insight on this topic.

Best regards,

Timoth=E9e Lecomte