Re: Plot placement, revisited

[Daniel J S. <dan...@ie...>]

Ethan Merritt wrote:

>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.
>

Just a bit disorganized, I think.  Not too bad.

>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.
>

I thought of the multiple keys thing too.  Not how to do it, but the 
possibility of doing it.


>  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.
>

You are directing, then, which key the signal should go into.  I like 
that.  That sort of fits the general philosophy of gnuplot.

Walking across town, I've sort of concluded that keywords 
"horizontal/vertical" would be more appropriate than "maxcols/maxrows". 
 I'll attempt a simple patch to introduce these keywords.  Not a full 
implementation, but something that at least allows me to manually 
position a horizontal key so I can finish the plot I'm after.

Dan