Re: Plot to PDF

[Jonathan Stickel]

Ben Abbott wrote:
> On Friday, July 10, 2009, at 09:53AM, "Jonathan Stickel"
> <address@hidden> wrote:
> > On 7/9/09 address@hidden wrote:
> > > From: Ben Abbott <address@hidden> Subject: Re: Plot to PDF To:
> > > Torquil Macdonald S?rensen <address@hidden> Cc:
> > > address@hidden Message-ID:
> > > <address@hidden> Content-Type:
> > > text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed; delsp=yes
> > >
> > > On Jul 9, 2009, at 6:50 PM, Torquil Macdonald S?rensen wrote:
> > >
> > > > > Hi!
> > > > >
> > > > > When I plot to pdf in octave, the page format turns out
> > > > > wrong. The resulting PDF looks like an A4 page, even though
> > > > > the actual plot is wider than its height (standard format).
> > > > > I'm using octave 3.2 and the newest gnuplot development 
> > > > > snapshot. Plotting to PDF with gnuplot works fine using the
> > > > > pdfcairo terminal.
> > > > >
> > > > > The command I have tried when plotting to pdf in octave is:
> > > > >
> > > > > fplot(blablabla...) print("plot.pdf")
> > > > >
> > > > > It works, apart from that page format issue. Anyone know how
> > > > > to do it right? I'm using the octave3.2 from Debian Sid.
> > > > >
> > > > > Thanks Torquil S?rensen
> > > It's not clear to me what you are seeing, or what you expect to
> > > see. So I'll explain what should happen and you can comment.
> > >
> > > Both pdf an postscript output respect the papersize and
> > > paperposition properties.
> > >
> > > The default are
> > >
> > > papersize = [8.5, 11]; paperposition = [0.25, 2.5, 8.0, 6.0];
> > >
> > > The resulting pdf/postscript output should (approximately) fill a
> > > 8x6 in box centered on a page of 8.5x11 inches.
> > >
> > > If this is what you see, then all is working correctly.
> > >
> > > If you'd like to produce a pdf to import into a LaTeX document
> > > (or a figure for a similar purpose), then try
> > >
> > > set (gcf, "papersize", [6.4, 4.8]) set (gcf, "paperposition", [0,
> > > 0, 6.4, 4.8]) plot (1:10) xlabel ("xlabel") ylabel ("ylabel") 
> > > title ("title") plot test.pdf
> > >
> > > Ben
> > This makes a nice looking plot, but it is in the lower left corner
> > of an 8.5x11 in page!  It seems that the papersize is not being
> > respected. Interestingly, the fonts of the pdf output are nice and
> > large.  However, if I subsequently print to eps, the fonts are tiny
> > in the eps output.
> >
> > Jonathan
>
> Thanks for catching the papersize bug. This is due to ghostscript.
> Presently ghostscript is used to produce a pdf from a postscript
> output. The postscript is the proper size (per the bounding box) but
> the resulting pdf is letter size (or perhaps a4). The solution will
> be to explicitly tell ghostscript the size of the page by using the
> options ...
>
> -dDEVICEWIDTHPOINTS=w -dDEVICEHEIGHTPOINTS=h
>
> Where w and h are in points.
>
> Another solution is to run the developers version of gnuplot (version
> >= 4.3).
>
> Regarding the eps fontsize, this is a gnuplot feature. I don't have a
> gnuplot manual handy, but I recall the decreased fontsize is
> documented. Perhaps we should use ghostscript to convert from ps to
> eps so that we obtain consistent fontsizes?
>
> I'll add these to my list of things that need work. However, my
> computer is still out for repair and I'm very busy with selling my
> home, packing, and moving ... it might be a few weeks before I can
> get to this. So if anyone has the initiative, please dig in.
>
> Ben

OK.  BTW, a big thanks for all your work on the plotting code.

Until this can be fixed within Octave, one workaround is to crop the pdf 
file after creation.  The perl script "pdfcrop" does a good job, and it 
is included with texlive.

Jonathan