Re: Suggestions for 5.0: Margin (and Key)

[Ethan A M. <sf...@us...>]

On Wednesday, 18 June, 2014 13:01:02 Philipp K. Janert wrote:
> 
> All -
> 
> Before it is too-too late, I wanted to put 
> forward thre small suggestions concerning 
> the margins and the key.
> 
> 
> 1) Naming of margins
> The naming of the margin options scatters 
> them around in any alphabetical listing of
> options. I wonder whether we could add 
> alternative names, that put the location 
> last (not first) - similar to what is done
> in CSS: margin-top, margin-bottom, etc.

Where do you mean?
They are already collected together so far as "show margin"
output is concerned, or "help set margin" for that matter.

> Alternatively (and more ambitiously) one could
> treat the location of the margin as a sub-option,
> like so:
> 	set margin top 5
> and so on. This would (in principle) allow to
> combine settings:
> 	set margin left right 5
> but I am not sure how useful that would be.

Maybe just 
	set margins [l],[r],[t],[b]

I have wanted that from time to time.

> 2) Explicit display of margin value
> Is there a way to show the actual margin value,
> when the margin is computed automatically? 

You mean in screen coordinates?

    set lmargin at screen GPVAL_TERM_XMIN / GPVAL_TERM_XSIZE

and so on.

> 3) Key position and offset
> A very similar situation arises with the positioning
> of the key. Frequently, I am happy with the automatic
> positioning, but would like to adjust it slightly.
> 
> I can see two solutions for that: one is that 
> 	show key
> would display the actual position of the margin (so
> that this position, when given to "set key at ..."
> would reproduce the previous plot), 

See above.  These values can be retrieved from the GPVAL variables.

	Ethan