Re: [Plplot-general] newbie questions

[Alan W. I. <ir...@be...>]

On 2006-09-29 09:54-0400 Steve Friedman wrote:

>
> I tried looking through the documentation and examples (BTW:  kudos to
> whoever thought of the examples page), but couldn't locate the commands
> for the following functions.  (For what it is worth, I am running plplot
> 5.6.1 via the python bindings on linux.)
>
> - I have a set of graphs produced per experimental run that are 4-up pages
> (e.g., plssub( 2, 2)) and 1-up pages (e.g., plssub(1,1)) and would like to
> add a common footer to all pages including such things as a description of
> the experiment and page number.  Neither plmtex() nor plptex() puts text
> relative to a page, but only relative to the individual viewport.
> Likewise, on the 4-up pages, I would like to put a header describing the 4
> graphs.  Ideally, the header/footer should occur prior to plssub() so the
> plssub() call can take into account the remaining available space.
>
> - I have a multitrace line plot and would like to add a trace legend.  I
> can't find the convenience function that would draw a line (including the
> current style, color, width, and markers) next to a given label.
>
> - Some of my graphs take time on the x-axis.  However, it seems that an
> array of strings is not accepted for the labels.  It seems that my
> alternatives are either to use fractions of hours or call plmtex() myself.
> Am I missing anything?

Sorry, but there are no convenience functions for any of these cases.
However, there are alternatives. You can divide a plot into nxn + 1
rectangular areas (nxn plots + footer) using nxn + 1 calls to plvpor. It
should be straightforward to combine low-level function calls to implement
the trace legend that you have described. Finally, to deal with date or time
plots, a reasonable fallback is to use fractions of a year, day, or hour or
else use the old astronomical research trick of plotting time coordinates in
Julian days minus some convenient offset.

In my opinion we probably don't need a convenience function for the first
case, but it might be worthwhile to implement trace legends or date (year,
month, day), and time (hours, minutes, seconds) axes. However, so far we
have had no C developers volunteer to do such implementations.

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation
for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software
package (plplot.org); the Yorick front-end to PLplot (yplot.sf.net); the
Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project
(lbproject.sf.net).
__________________________

Linux-powered Science
__________________________