Re: printing figures with development version

[John W. Eaton]

On 27-Mar-2009, Ben Abbott wrote:

| What you see is intended. You'll need to adjust the figure's paper 
properties. Specifically, "papersize" and "paperpositon"
| 
| If you'd like an 6.4in x 4.8in eps file
| 
| figure (1)
| clf
| plot (randn (50, 1))
| set (gcf, "paperunits", "inches"); # the default is "inches"
| paper_size = [6.4, 4.8];
| set (gcf, "papersize", paper_size)
| set (gcf, "papertype", "<custom>")
| set (gcf, "paperposition", [0, 0, paper_size])
| print (gcf, strcat ("figtest", version, ".eps"), "-depsc")
| 
| This will be much simpler once the all listeners for these properties are in 
place.

If I print to a .eps file, I expect that the bounding box of the
figure will be fairly tight around the figure so that it may be
included directly in another document without a lot of extra
whitespace surrounding it.  I think that is most useful.  I also don't
expect to have to fiddle with paper properties to make that happen
(how would I know that 6.4x4.8 inches are good values?).

Earlier versions of Octave did not add extra whitespace around the
figure, so I think we will see a lot of complaints about this change
if it escapes into a stable version.

What is the motivation for the change?  Is there something good about
this design choice that I'm missing?  If the change is purely for
Matlab compatibility, then I think this is one of those things that we
should not copy.

jwe