Re: Bug in logarithmic minitics + suggested fix

[<br...@ph...>]

Aapo Lankinen wrote:

> Yes, it is difficult to say what should be done, when the user wants,
> say 12 minitic intervals on a logarithmic plot with tic interval 100.

And don't forget that the log base may well be something else than 10...
'set log y 2; set ytics 1024; set mytics 10' anyone?

> Actually, the automatic system "set mytics default" appears to work in a
> rather sensible fashion, but unfortunately the user requested minitics
> are not honoured.  

That's not really the case. gnuplot does try to honour them --- 
otherwise the code snippets you dug up wouldn't even exist to be found, 
and it would not work for 'set ytics 10' either. The problem is that 
there's at least one bug in that (or nearby) code.

 > Also, I think that for the user requested minitics
> the arithmetic intervals would be better, because the user requested
> minitics probably aren't in "nice" places (otherwise "auto" and
> "default" would be used) and for awkward positions the arithmetic
> intervals are by far easier to read and understand.  

Tell that to the people who plot stock charts on log axes  --- they 
*insist* on getting exactly those graphically equidistant, yet 
numerically unreadable tics.

This part of the problem is that as soon as the axis scale isn't linear, 
the existing means for users to express their tic placement wishes 
become ambiguous.  This can only be resolved by adding a new feature to 
'set mxtics' & friends --- but now's really not the time to discuss, 
much less implement such a thing.  I suggest you write a Feature Request 
about this proposed extension, so it can be addressed once the dust has 
settled on the planned 4.2 release.