Re: Patches for escalated value setting in base_property and autopositioning of labels in fltk

[bpabbott]

On Dec 08, 2010, at 12:05 PM, logari81 <address@hidden> wrote:

On Wed, 2010-12-08 at 16:13 +0000, bpabbott wrote:
> On Dec 08, 2010, at 10:54 AM, logari81 <address@hidden>
> wrote:
>
>
> > Hi all,
> >
> > I have recently started seeking ways for implementing the
> > "tightinset"
> > property in the fltk backend. Though, before I can do any progress
> > on
> > this issue, there is a bug with title and labels positioning which
> > has
> > to be fixed.
> >
> > Currently running
> > xlabel('x label', 'rotation', 90)
> > with the fltk backend will have no effect on the orientation of the
> > xlabel.
> >
> > In order to fix this bug it is necessary to distinguish when the
> > position/rotation of a text object is explicitly set by the user, so
> > that the auto-positioning is correspondingly disabled.
> >
> > I haven't found a way to mark a property as set by the user or set
> > by
> > octave, so I decided to extend the base_property object with a flag
> > named "weak" which can be used to distinguish if a property is set
> > "weakly", for example when its value is guessed by octave, or
> > "strongly", for example when it is set explicitly by the user. The
> > implementation of the corresponding infrastructure is included in
> > the
> > first changeset: "base_property_weak.changeset". Any other
> > suggestions
> > are more than welcome.
> >
>
> Other properties have a "mode" which can take values of "auto" or
> "manual". For consistency can the same nomenclature be used?
>
>
> For reference, I did check Matlab's behavior. Matlab does appear to
> have a hidden (AFAIK) method to track when the position/rotation is
> set automatically or set manually by the user.
>
>
> Ben
>
>

Maybe using additional properties like

rotationmode
positionmode
horizontalalignmentmode
verticalalignmentmode

would be the simplest solution. Though I believe that these properties,
if used, then they should be hidden, otherwise the user is overwhelmed
with unnecessary information. Are there currently other hidden
properties present in octave so that I can use them as an example in
order to provide an alternative fix based on this idea?

BR

Kostas

My original thought was that "auto"/"manual" would be more consistent with the current nomenclature than "weak"/"strong". I have no strong opinion as to how this should be implemented ... provided the implementation could be used for the gnuplot backend as well. I think you're original approach or one which adds new properties would be ok.

My understanding is that the xlabel, ylabel, zlabel, and title objects are all normal text objects. Using Matlab they can be set to other text objects.

For example ...

plot (1:10)

hx = xlabel ('X Label');

ht = text (5, 5, 'Hello World');

set (gca, 'xlabel', ht);

Will result in the axes property xlabel being set equal to ht. Doing this will delete the original hx object. An unexpected change is that the position and rotation properties of the text object corresponding to ht are set to the "auto" values.

Regarding the properties you suggested, my understanding is that properties that are intended to be private are given names that with leading and trailing "__" characters.

__rotationmode__

__positionmode__

__horizontalalignmentmode__

__verticalalignmentmode__

In case you're unfamiliar with it, you can use the "addproperty" function to add to the text objects as they are assigned to the xlabel, ylabel, zlabel, or title properties.

Ben