From maintainers-request at octave dot org Thu Jan 27 10:55:16 2005
Subject: Plotting Documentation (was Re: "no data point found" trying to plot  2D)
From: Quentin Spencer <qspencer at ieee dot org>
To: maintainers at octave dot org
Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2005 10:55:04 -0600

John W. Eaton wrote:

>| Bug report for Octave 2.1.64 configured for i686-pc-linux-gnu
>| 
>|   Hi, I tried the first example that appears in Octave documentation under
>| the title "Plotting - Two-Dimensional Plotting" that is
>| 
>| 	gplot rand (100,1) with linespoints
>  
>
I see a lot of people on the mailing lists using the low-level "gplot" 
functions to do printing. I find using "plot" much easier, and I seem to 
recall from John's past postings that he feels this is the preferred 
way. I came to Octave from Matlab, so I've never read this documentation 
in much detail but looking at it now, it seems to give very little 
information about the higher level plot functions. Perhaps this explains 
why so many people try to do it the "hard" way (I realize that some 
users have good reasons for using gplot, but that should be the 
exception). I think the plotting documentation could use a rewrite, and 
I'm volunteering to submit some patches when I get some time to work on 
it. I want to know if there's anything else in doc/interpreter/plot.txi 
that is inadequately documented. One other FAQ on the help list is how 
to export plots. I would like to propose including the "print" function 
from Octave-Forge in octave. Is there a reason to not do this? Are there 
modifications necessary to consider including it?

regards,
Quentin