Re: Now is it still impossible to use __gnuplot_X__ functions?

[John W. Eaton]

On 12-Jan-2010, Matthias Brennwald wrote:

| 1. You might be able to send gnuplot commands through the stream
| that is used for communication between Octave and gnuplot. I don't
| know much about this, however. Someone else might be able to help
| here.

I'd recommend against this since then it ties your code to gnuplot
only, and will fail in the future if the graphics backend is not using
gnuplot.

| 2. Save your data to a file and use gnuplot to plot the data in this
| file. Maybe you can make a gnuplot script and run gnuplot with this
| script from within Octave using the system(...) command. This
| applroach is independent of Octaves plotting mechanisms and will
| allow you to use every gnuplot command you can think of.

If you want to use gnuplot-specific commands, then I think this is the
way to go.

As far as I know, support for label and text rotation in gnuplot
depends on the terminal driver you are using.  On my system with
either the wxt or x11 terminal the following command executed directly
in gnuplot doesn't rotate the label

  set xlabel "foo" rotate by 45

but

  set label "foo" at 0, 0 rotate by 45

does rotate the text.  And when I say "show xlabel" at the gnuplot
prompt, it shows

  xlabel is "foo", offset at ((character units) 0, 0, 0), rotated by 45 degrees 
textcolor lt -1

so apparently it knows that I requested the rotation.

Also, from doing

  xlabel ("foo", "rotation", 45, "fontsize", 18)
  drawnow ("x11", "/dev/null", 0, "debug.gp")

in Octave, I see the following line in debug.gp

  set xlabel "foo" textcolor rgb "#000000" font ",18" enhanced rotate by 
45.000000;

so I think Octave *is* handling the rotation, but gnuplot is ignoring
it, at least with the wxt or x11 terminal drivers.

jwe