Re: [Plplot-devel] control position of floating point label

[Hazen B. <hba...@ma...>]

Steve Schwartz wrote:
> Dear Hazen,
> 
>>> It would appear that the position and orientation of this x10^nn
>>> labelling is not under user programmer control. It would be nice to be
>>> able to control this or, perhaps better, have the option to suppress it
>>> altogether but access the resulting string (or exponent) so that we
>>> could construct a complete label, e.g., "Te.para (x10#u6#d K)". This
>>> suppression is more dangerous but offers more flexibility. Merely being
>>> able to change the position and orientation would already be a big help.
>>>
>>> This would need to be done somewhere in the core routines I suspect. 
>>>
>>> Any comments on the desirability of any of this and a possible
>>> implementation?
>> One option is to make the graph without any labels, then add them 
>> yourself using plmtex(). This gives you complete control of the label 
>> text and position at the cost of having to layout all the labels yourself.
>>
>> -Hazen
> 
> This is of course possible, but very undesirable from my perspective -
> only a desperate last resort. Not only does it imply manually doing the
> very kind of thing that plplot does so well, it also opens up the door
> to real errors. If we let plplot mark of the axes with ticks and then
> try to label them ourselves, we need to be sure we follow (= code
> ouselves) the same algorithm plplot uses to decide where to put the
> ticks, and also that we will always get the transition from fixed to
> floating pt correct. This sound to me like reinventing the wheel when in
> the simplest case all that is required is the ability to change position
> and orientation values (3 numbers) that are at present not accessible
> from the api interface.

Ok. Do you just want to be able to move the "(x10)" label? You could 
rescale the data so that plplot thought that no "(x10)" label was 
necessary, then add that label yourself in a position and orientation 
that you thought was appropriate. Or did you want to be able to specify 
the position and orientation of all the axis labels?

-Hazen