Re: color box positioning for splot

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

On Fri, 12 Dec 2003, Daniel J Sebald wrote:
[...]

> If you ask me, even without doing a rotation, the graph just doesn't
> look right.

That's mainly a question about *where* the color box gets put, then, not
how the 'view' setting affects its placement, but shouldn't.  That didn't
appear to be covered by Petr's question.  Maybe you discussed so much in
private that you forgot what part of that long story the rest of us never
heard of.

> If the colorbox is removed, there is a nice even border around the plot.

That this margin is even is nice alright.  Its very existence, however,
arguably isn't.  Esp. since the way it's generated completely neglects a
couple of important settings, most importantly all the margins except
lmargin, and also 'set size ratio'. 

I personally think that the current arrangement of the colour box and plot
is reasonably fine.  The graph itself is better off being centered in the
window.  Given we have those rather uselessly wide margins to the side of
the 3D graph anyway, I don't see any harm done putting optional plot
decorations like the color box out there.

> But when the color box is present, the plot image isn't altered; the
> color box is just stuffed in one of the margins.  I'm arguing that the
> colorbox position code should open that margin a bit more and place the
> colorbox as a separate entity. Repositioning the plotting region
> shouldn't be that difficult.  It would be the same for both 2d and 3d.

In a nutshell, that would mean you want boundary3d() to behave more
similarly, or maybe even just *call*, its 2D sibling: boundary().  Fine
with me if someone gets it done, but unless we want to put 4.0 on hold for
another several months of bugfixing after a change in such a rather
fragile part of the code, I recommend against trying this right now.

For the time being, the change I outlined would do exactly what Petr did
(seem to) ask for: it makes the position of the color box independent of
'set view' by fixing it to terminal-independant and view-independent
position.  One could argue that the correct position should be given in
the same coordinate system as user-specified color box placements, i.e.
"screen" coordinates, but that's a separate issue.

> Hey, I just looked at the "pslatex" mode because I recalled a problem
> with 3d borders there.  I see that "pslatex"'s output is slightly
> different than it used to be.  No longer are there separate files for
> the postscript and Tex.

You looked incorrectly then, I guess.  The option needed to get separate
files is 'auxfile', and it's still alive and well, as far as I'm aware of.

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