Re: Interactive terminals : behaviour on window resizing

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

On Friday 24 March 2006 11:08 am, Timoth=E9e Lecomte wrote:
>=20
> I would like to discuss what is the expected behaviour of the interactive
> terminals when the user resizes the windows.

> 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 am afraid that most terminal types do not have enough information
about fonts to re-scale on their own.
And what if the font isn't scalable?

> I can imagine two other possibilites for the plot behavior when the user
> changes the window's size :
>=20
>   1) really scale everything - including the font size

This would be very odd in x11.  I cannot think of a single x11 application
in which the font size changes as you resize the window.  Generally you
pick a readable font size, and that's the size you get no matter how big
or small the window is.

>   2) don't scale anything and just display the plot centered in the window
> if it is smaller than the window, and if it is bigger add scrollbars on
> the edges of the window.

Why would you ever want that? =20

> Thanks for your insight on this topic.

One change that has been suggested for x11 is to honor the
"set ratio" command; scaling up or down as the window size changes, but
always keeping the requested aspect ratio.

=2D-=20
Ethan A Merritt
Biomolecular Structure Center
University of Washington, Seattle 98195-7742