Re: corner case?

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

On Monday 22 December 2008, Allin Cottrell wrote:
> Plotting the following wacky dataset (from a test for statistical
> programs by Leland Wilkinson)...
> 
> obs  y          x
> 
> 1    99999991   0.99999991
> 2    99999992   0.99999992
> 3    99999993   0.99999993
> 4    99999994   0.99999994
> 5    99999995   0.99999995
> 6    99999996   0.99999996
> 7    99999997   0.99999997
> 8    99999998   0.99999998
> 9    99999999   0.99999999
> 
> gnuplot does fine, except that it puts "1" for each of 11 x-axis
> tics, and "1e+08" for each of 6 y-axis tics, which looks a little
> brain-damaged.
> 
> The tic marks can, of course, be improved manually, but it's a bit
> of a sweat, particularly since the C'ism '#' does not seem to be
> recognized in format strings (I mean, as in "%#.8g").
> 
> Any thoughts on whether it's worth working on making the tics look
> better by default for this sort of case?

There's already a feature request open for this issue:
  2007285  	  Auto-expand number of digits for tics with small axis range

But it's a surprisingly hard thing to fix.
Patches welcome.

 



-- 
Ethan A Merritt
Biomolecular Structure Center
University of Washington, Seattle 98195-7742