splot - How to remove unused space at bottom of z-axis?

[crawford richard]

In message-Id: <19970313234...@mortgage.Haas.Berkeley.EDU>
Richard Stanton <sta...@haas.berkeley.edu> wrote:

> Whenever I do a 3D plot, about 3/4 of the z axis corresponds to the
> selected z-range, and the bottom 1/4 is unused. I've probably just
> missed something obvious, but is there a way to prevent this bottom
> part being unused? If splot used the full available height, it would
> be much easier to see small vertical differences in the plotted
> surface.

There is indeed a way to control this. The command is the obscurely-named
'set ticslevel <D>', where D is the distance from the bottom of the z-axis
(where the x/y plane is drawn) to the lowest z-tic. The units are those of
the z-data. In gnuplot 3.5, the value must be positive; in pre-3.6 this
restriction has been eliminated, but be aware that labels and axes may be
overwritten by the data (or vice-versa) if large negative values are used
(just how large is data-dependent).

Due to a bug in the master documentation file for 3.5, there is no 'help'
for 'set ticslevel'; you will find it under 'help set tics' instead. This
bug has been replaced by new ones in the pre-3.6 documentation. :-)

Dick Crawford, aka rccra...@lanl.gov

[Jose Luis Marin]

In article <9703141830.AA21283@rho>,

Wow, thanks a lot! I spent several hours yesterday trying to figure
out this, and I was ready to post the same question. Wouldn't it be
clearer if we could have a specific setting for this, something like:
"set zaxisheight" or similar?

At least I didn't waste all the time I spent searching for this,
because I found about all the nifty new features in beta 3.6. Great
work, gnuplot developers!

Jose L Marin