From owner-help-octave at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu  Mon Dec  2 15:52:33 1996
Subject: Re: Matlab ginput 
From: "John W. Eaton" <jwe at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu>
To: Mario Storti <mstorti at galileo dot unl dot edu dot ar>
Cc: help-octave at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu
Date: Mon, 2 Dec 1996 15:51:29 -0600

On  2-Dec-1996, Mario Storti <mstorti at galileo dot unl dot edu dot ar> wrote:

: BTW, is there a way to know the aspect ratio of the gnuplot window?

I don't know if gnuplot can return this information.  Even if it can,
it is not currently possible to have it returned in a variable in Octave.

: I want  to have the same scale  factor in both  axis, since I'm plotting
: finite element meshes, and similar things. In Matlab 3.5 for DOS there
: was the axis('square') feature.

With some terminal drivers, the commands

  set size square

or

  set size ratio 1

will set the plot axes to be square, though the scales are not
necessarily forced to be the same, so circles may still be displayed
as ellipses.  For example,

  gnuplot> set size ratio 1
  gnuplot> set parametric

	  dummy variable is t for curves, u/v for surfaces
  gnuplot> plot sin(t), cos(t)

shows a circle on my X display, but
  
  gnuplot> set xrange [-2:2]
  gnuplot> replot

turns it into an ellipse.

This works with gnuplot 3.6beta, anyway.  I didn't check earlier
versions.

jwe