Thank you very much for the reply Nicholas
Here is the datafile enclosed
and the results regarding your versions and the results of graphics_toolkit and trying other toolkits?
ok, absent any more details about what is actually happening on your end, here's my guess:
Octave seems to not currently support the facecolor option passed to meshc in this way. It may be a bug, not sure. Matlab seems to allow it and the color gets passed to the underlying surface object as the help suggests it should. Octave seems to try to assign that property to the 'property group' that meshc creates, and a group doesn't get a facecolor. in any case, even in matlab setting the facecolor of the underlying surface object doesn't seem to change appearance at all.
in any case, you failed to mention whether you get an error when running the meshc command, which I now see. it appears that this error interrupts proper handling of the graphics properties. subsequent calls to xlabel, etc. are then unpredictable. when running gnuplot as your graphics toolkit (which is again my best guess of what you're doing) this appears to break the ability to do follow-on labels, etc., altogether. with qt or fltk, I'm still able to apply labels.
best immediate fix: switch from gnuplot to qt, and drop the facecolor statement. i'll see if it warrants a bug report on the facecolor issue.