Re: axis equal help!

[pathematica]

Dear John and others

First, thanks for the great program - it is an exemplar in the open source
world.

I am also having problems plotting vectors in 3d space. 

The fix you suggest given above frames particular plots symmetrically about
their global extrema but that is not the problem. I need to create a
symmetrical convex hull into which I can plot vectors. I can specify the
same range for each of the axes to create the necessary octant in the 3d
orthonormal vector space. It is straightforward to force the xy aspect
square but the z axis remains persistently foreshortened despite trying a
number of fixes (including those on this particular thread). It is worth
emphasising that I am creating a vector space in which to show shapes rather
than a function of two variables in which the xy plane specifies the
arguments of the function. 

I am using Octave and gnuplot under ubuntu 10.04. 
Ubuntu supplies octave 3.2.3 and gnuplot 4.2.6-1 from its repositories. 
Following a hint given above, I manually upgraded gnuplot to version 4.4 but
this did not help.
I have tried several other fixes (from this and other sources) but none seem
to work.
I have read the manual, honest!

Any help would be gratefully received.

-----------------------------------------------------------------
Background (included in case it might be helpful but appended after the
description of the problem in case it is not).

I am trying to create a computer aided learning package which appeals to the
geometry of a particular process (rather than to the algebra). For this to
make sense, I require a 1:1:1 aspect ratio for the plot3 output. 

I have given a live presentation which worked well. The plots were generated
live during the presentation (to show I was not cheating). I manually
resized the height of the X windows generated by gnuplot to create the
required 1:1:1 aspect ratio visually. 

I am trying to create a package that others could use unsupervised. Of
course, it would be possible to give instructions on how to resize the
gnuplot output X-windows manually (as I did in the live presentation) but
that would not be elegant (and it might appear to be a cheat to the
mathematically unsophisticated, which is the target audience and the reason
why I am appealing to geometry). 

I also want to create a publication using the images. Plotting to files
(rather than to the screen) produces rectangular cuboids (ie square prisms
foreshortened on the z axis) rather than cubes (as you would know, even if
the windows are resized beforehand). I can post process the images with eg
GIMP for this but as the text is scaled (as well as the plots) this method
is not ideal. 

I was hoping the computer aided package and the publication might be a
showcase of what can be achieved with open source software.

PS did I say "thanks for the program"? It bears repeating!

-- 
View this message in context: 
http://octave.1599824.n4.nabble.com/axis-equal-help-tp1636701p2288007.html
Sent from the Octave - General mailing list archive at Nabble.com.