Re: Plot placement, revisited

[Ethan M. <merritt@u.washington.edu>]

On Friday 23 July 2004 12:09 pm, Daniel J Sebald wrote:
> 
> It would be nice to be able to control the "max no cols" vs. "max no 
> row" independent of the autoplacement.  As it stands, there is no 
> "above" autoplacement, only "below";  and there is the using up space 
> issue I've mentioned.

I quite agree with you that the current setup has lots of problems.
I thought a bit about trying to introduce explicit code to control the
number of rows and columns. Then I looked at the code and shuddered.

Then I thought some more and decided that a better goal was to
work toward generalizing the setup in a different way.  I started by
moving all the key-specific data into a single structure, with the idea
that one could then support multiple keys.  Rather than trying to 
control the column layout with a key, you would instead assign
half the plots, say, to one key box and the other half to a second
key box.   Each box could be separately positioned in x and y.
It would look to the user something like

	set key 1 title "First Half" at x1, y1
	set key 2 title "The Rest" at x2, y2
	plot 'data' u 1:2 key 1 title "whatever, \
                    '' u 1:3 key 2 title "whatever"

and so on.

I never got any further than that in coding, but anyway that's my
suggestion as to what we might aim for.


-- 
Ethan A Merritt       merritt@u.washington.edu
Biomolecular Structure Center
Mailstop 357742
University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195