Re: Suggestions for 5.0: Margin (and Key)

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

On Wednesday, 18 June, 2014 15:40:11 Philipp K. Janert wrote:
> On Wed, 18 Jun 2014 15:31:46 -0700
> Ethan A Merritt <sf...@us...> wrote:
> 
> > On Wednesday, 18 June, 2014 15:03:32 Philipp K. Janert wrote:
> > 
> > > > > 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.
> > > 
> > > What variables hold the key position? When I
> > > do "show variables all", nothing seems appropriate.
> > 
> > I meant that you can position the key box relative to the plot
> > border by using, e.g.
> > 
> >   set key top right at graph 0.98, graph 0.98
> 
> But that's not what I mean! I know that I can place
> the key arbitrarily - IFF I know, in absolute terms,
> where I want it!
> 
> My use case is this: I want to use the automatically 
> chosen position as starting point, and then modify it.
> This could be done through an "offset" directive in
> "set key", but it could also be done if I could read
> out the currently chosen key position from some 
> automatically set GPVAL variable. But none of the
> GPVAL vars seems to refer to the current key position.
> 
> Or am I missing something?

I think you are correct that it could only be done by adding a
new parameter equivalent to "offset".   The default positioning
uses an empirical try/oops/try-again approach that is basically
impossible to document usefully.   Note that the empirical positioning
can easily come out differently on different terminals, so even if
we were to add a tweak parameter you'd have to tweak all over
again if you changed the output device.

	Ethan