Re: Matlab compatible legends for FLTK/Gnuplot backends?

[David Bateman]

Ben Abbott wrote:
> On Sep 5, 2010, at 11:02 PM, David Bateman wrote:
>
>   
> > I'm not seeing this with gnuplot 4.2.6. Though I do with gnuplot 4.4.0. If you 
> > add
> >
> > set (gca(), "activepositionproperty", "outerposition")
> >
> > after the call to legend in gnuplot 4.4.0, I get the same behavior as for 
> > gnuplot 4.2.6 where the legend is compressed and badly placed. I'd say it looks 
> > like an issue in __go_draw_* code for the parsing of the position and 
> > outerposition parameters for use with gnuplot rather than in the legend code.
> >
> > D.
> >     
>
> I ran some tests changing the activepositionproperty for both axes and for each 
> version of gnuplot (see my attached plots).
>
> If you change the snippet below ....
>
>         ## FIXME A hack for gnuplot. God knows why this is needed
>         if (strcmp (get (fig, "__backend__"), "gnuplot"))
>           set (ca(1), "activepositionproperty", "position");
>         endif
>
> ... to ...
>
>           set (hlegend, "activepositionproperty", "position");
>
> The legend looks correct. This is also the value that Matlab assigns to activepositionproperty for the legend. 
>
> However, that doesn't address the problem seen when running gnuplot 4.4, setting the gca's 
> activeposition  to "position" and the legend's activepositon to 
> "outerposition". I'll take a look at that.
>
> Ben
>
>   
I'm sizing the legend relative to the axis "position" property in all 
cases, so that things like "southoutside" might be able to align the 
edges of the key with the plot (though it doesn't yet). The legend 
itself is placed relative to the "outerposition" of the axis if the 
legend is "outside" of the plot. Note that I was setting the legend 
"position" and "outerposition" are being set to  the same value in the 
legend axis as there are no axis labels, title, ticks etc to include. 
Looking at the way position and outerposition are autoupdating between 
themselves, this is probably not the right thing to do.

However, with gnuplot

plot(1,10); set (gca(), "activiepositionproperty", "position")

doesn't give the same plot size as

plot(1,10); set (gca(), "activiepositionproperty", "outerposition")

which if I'm reading

http://www.mathworks.com/help/techdoc/creating_plots/f1-32495.html

correctly is not the right thing to happen. The fltk backend seems to 
get this right..

D.