Plotting in octave

[JHBrewer]

I would like to be able to make a publishable 2D plot in Octave, but nothing I have found will generate a plot with axis numbering that would survive the usual size reduction for two-column journals. I have learned how to control the fonts used in axis labels and titles, so those are fine, but there seems to be no control whatever over the font size used for the numbers that go beside the tick marks on the axes. Perhaps I have just failed to guess what these are called in Octave and/or Gnuplot.

I had the same problem in Gnuplot, but was able to solve it (sort of) by simple making the whole plot smaller (set size). This was once possible with the old __gnuplot_set__ command, but it has been deprecated and its effect turned off. This logically implies that some other command has taken its place, but if so, I have been unable to discover it.

Since no one could publish a Figure with tiny little numbers, I assume that someone must know a way around this problem. I would be happy to know it, but much happier to see the Octave documentation address it directly.

[PureW]

Since no one could publish a Figure with tiny little numbers, I assume that someone must know a way around this problem. I would be happy to know it, but much happier to see the Octave documentation address it directly.

I second this, it's not clear how to make the axis-numbering readable in this code:

plot(1:50);
xlabel('Time (1969=t_0)', 'FontSize', 100);
print -deps -color -F:64 population_k0.eps

Neither FontSize, nor -F:64 seems to result in any change to the font size.

[UChris]

Some discussion on the help-octave mailing list suggests trying:

set(gca, 'fontsize', size)

This will not fix legend sizing, but will fix the axis sizing. (This tip from "MA")

The same sizing problem also affects image annotations made using the text() command. The set() solution above does not fix text() annotation. If using the text() command, you can use LaTeX sizing commands to control font size. This appears to work in conjunction with the print() command. For example:

text(-2, -2, '{\fontsize{16} 0.6175}')

This produces text with a size of 16pt.