Re: fontsize vs fontscale?

[sfeam <sf...@us...>]

On Thursday, 26 March 2015 03:53:22 PM Philipp K. Janert wrote:
> 
> I was wondering: how is "fontscale" to be used?
> 
> Is the primary idea that I can change the font 
> size, even without knowing what it actually is?

The primary use that I see is rescaling a previously composed
figure for a new use.  Suppose you originally composed a 
figure for screen display, with appropriate font sizes,
line widths, dash lengths, and so on.   Now you want to use
it for publication, but typically a publisher requests figures
to be suitable for printing at 300 dpi.  This is roughly
three times a typical workstation screen display resolution.

If you just change the requested size of the figure by a
factor of 3, then all the lines will be too thin, the fonts
will be too small, and dashed lines will become less distinguishable.
The fix is to keep the same commands that generated your
original plot but scale up those properties to match the
scale-up of the canvas size.

E.g.

  # Display figure on the screen
  set term png size 700, 500
  set output '|display png:-'
  load "Figure.gp"
  pause -1

  # Now rescale the same figure for publication
  set term png size 2100, 1500 fontscale 3 lw 3 dl 3
  set output 'Figure.png'
  load "Figure.gp"

NB: In gnuplot 5 dashlength scales with linewidth already,
    so the "dl 3" part is not required.  But that was not
    true in gnuplot 4.


	Ethan



> 
> Best,
> 
> 		Ph.