Re: [Gnuplot-info] Tic labels overwrite axes

[Hans-Bernhard B. <br...@ph...>]

On Fri, 28 May 2004, Periklis Akritidis wrote:

> On Thu, May 27, 2004 at 11:49:02PM +0200, Hans-Bernhard Broeker wrote:
> > On Thu, 27 May 2004, Periklis Akritidis wrote:
> > 
> > > Hello,
> > > 
> > > Even a simple 3d plot such as splot sin(x) + cos(y) results in numbers
> > > overwriting each other (at the points where the axes meat each other)
> > > as well as the axes. 
> > 
> > What terminal driver?  Which version of gnuplot?  Which font did you use,
> > at which size?
> 
> Postscript driver and gnuplot 4.0, I tried various fonts, but I need them
> to have a certain size so that they are readable, which I guess makes things
> worse (I can prevent them from overwriting each other by changing the xtics
> increment, the problem with overwriting the axes, x and y, remains).

A concrete example would have been better, but I've since found one
myself...

If you compare the behaviour of PostScript with that of the X11 terminal,
you'll find that the problem is almost completely absent in X11 (except at
the corners, where tick labels from neighboring axes do tend to overlap,
but I suspect there's really not much that can be done about that).

I.e. it's quite certainly the mismatch between PostScript's actual font
metrics and gnuplot's guesses of them that's causing this.

> I understand that it may be non-trivial to to it automagically, what I
> was hoping for was something like the xoff and yoff options to xlabel.

Alas such an option doesn't exist.  But here's an alternative that *might*
help: "set tics out".  This will put the tickmarks to the outside of the
graph box, thus pushing the tick labels further away from the borders. You
can even use the ticscale setting to decide how far way they'll be.

> So if such an option does not exist, I would like to submit a wishlist
> item:) What syntax would be appropriate for such an option?

Well, fell free to register this as a Feature Request in the
SourceForge.net project pages.  The syntax should probably be xoff and
yoff options to "set xtics" and friends.

-- 
Hans-Bernhard Broeker (br...@ph...)
Even if all the snow were burnt, ashes would remain.