From help-octave-request at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu  Tue Feb  3 06:46:30 1998
Subject: Switching between multi-plots
From: Ted Harding <Ted dot Harding at nessie dot mcc dot ac dot uk>
To: help-octave at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu
Date: Tue, 03 Feb 1998 12:47:24 -0000 (GMT)

With the multiplot facilities of gnuplot-3.6, an enhancement to the "figure()" 
command would be useful.

Suppose, for instance, you have already plotted "figure(1)" and then something
else in "figure(2)".

Now you switch back using the command "figure(1)". As far as I can see, the
only effect of this is to redirect plot output to window 1: all of the plotting
environment of window 2 (including the datafile just plotted) is still in
force. In particular, a "replot" command will now put a copy of window 2 into
window 1.

What I would ideally like is that, after "figure(1)", the original environment
of window 1 is restored (so that, for instance, a "replot" would re-draw the
original window 1). The reason is that for a lot of work, I like to modify the
environment (e.g. change xrange, yrange, title, labels etc) after having looked
at other plots, or plot a transformation of the original; and it is
inconvenient to have to recreate all I want to keep of the plotting environment
in order to do this.

I can think of a number of ways to enhance the "figure" function in order to
partially achieve this, though I'm not seeing how to keep track of the
datafile being plotted (which is a temp file with a random name).
Alternatively, wrapping the octave "plot" function in a script which would keep
track of these things is also feasible, but would be more complicated.

I'm raising this for discussion: I think it would be a very useful enhancement,
but I'm really unclear about the best way to approach it and would welcome
other people's ideas. If anything useful comes of it, then I'll happily put it
up for others to use.

I suppose the best solution would be for gnuplot itself to restore the
environment when you switch windows, but as far as I can see it will do nothing
of the sort.

Best wishes to all,
Ted.

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E-Mail: Ted Harding <Ted dot Harding at nessie dot mcc dot ac dot uk>
Date: 03-Feb-98                                       Time: 12:47:24
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