Re: Scale change for Plot Figures in the Manual

[Ben Abbott]

On Nov 28, 2009, at 4:27 PM, John W. Eaton wrote:

> On 27-Nov-2009, Michael D. Godfrey wrote:
> 
> | I looked at the current octave.pdf to see if my method
> | of recovering from the doc/interpreter build problem had
> | worked.  This caused me to notice that the Figures in the
> | Plotting Chapter are now about 1/5 intended size.  I looked
> | back at a Manual generated on 23 November.  (Before the
> | build problem.)  It shows the same scale problem.
> | 
> | I believe that the build script always uses octave -f, so
> | the problem is probably not due to my having backend("fltk")
> | in my .octaverc file.
> | 
> | Is this problem happening to others?
> 
> Yes, it seems that we are now using
> 
>  print -dpdf
> 
> to create the PDF files and the resulting output is not cropped
> tightly around teh bounding box of the figure.
> 
> If that is what the -dpdf option is supposed to do, then I guess we
> should probably just have the  Makefile produce .eps files and then
> convert them to formats we need instead of using Octave's print
> function to generate the various formats.
> 
> jwe


"print -dpdf" should output the size of which is defined by the "pagesize" 
property.

Seeing this reminded me that we'd discussed this some months ago. See the 
thread below.

        
http://old.nabble.com/printing-figures-with-development-version-td22746152.html#a22835985

The problem can be resolved by switching to eps. However, it is possible that 
the axes labels may be clipped. In that case, the pdf size may be specified by 
changing the defualtpapersize and defaultpaperposition prior to generating the 
pdfs.

        image_size = [6.4, 4.8]; % in inches 
        border = 0;
        set (0, "defaultfigurepapertype", "<custom>") 
        set (0, "defaultfigurepapersize", image_size + 2*border) 
        set (0, "defaultfigurepaperposition", [border, border, image_size]) 

If the axes labels for the pdf get cut off, the "border" may be increased.

Ben