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stacked plots

Posted: Fri Aug 11, 2006 1:03 pm
by esporter
Does anybody have a decent method for making stacked plots (multiple plots on one page)? I'm doing it by hand in PowerPoint, but D-Plot's "quirky" pasting anomalies are making it painful.

Posted: Fri Aug 11, 2006 1:29 pm
by DPlotAdmin
For multiple plots on one page just click the "Multiple" button on the Print dialog.

Thanks, but...

Posted: Fri Aug 11, 2006 1:36 pm
by esporter
Now how do I get it into a Word doc? Or any other program.
BTW for anyone considering it, the PowerPoint-by-hand method produces ugly results when you try to integrate it into Word.

Thanks again.

Posted: Fri Aug 11, 2006 1:56 pm
by DPlotAdmin
You don't. At least not that way. I thought from your question you just wanted a hard copy.

If you have Acrobat or any other program that will import a PDF file you can use the Multiple button in DPlot and "print" to a PDF file. But that's no help with Office products.

What "quirks" are you running into in PowerPoint? If you force the size of the plot to be what you want in PowerPoint using Options>Extents/Intervals/Size (so that no scaling is required) then the plot in PowerPoint should be very nearly identical to what you see on the screen in DPlot.

Posted: Fri Aug 11, 2006 2:31 pm
by esporter
It's nearly right, but it frequently cuts off axis labels, and line thicknesses don't quite match between plots. Altogether it produces a result that is less than publication quality.

Also...

Posted: Fri Aug 11, 2006 2:53 pm
by esporter
When I try to force scaling with the Extents/Intervals/Size box, two of my three plots come out the same size, while the third is slightly smaller. This prevents the x-axes from lining up when I try to stack them. All three plots have the same X and Y axes.
And no, I can't put all of my data into one plot.

This is very frustrating to be such a simple problem. If hand-drawn plots were acceptable, I'd have been done long ago.

Posted: Fri Aug 11, 2006 3:06 pm
by DPlotAdmin
When I try to force scaling with the Extents/Intervals/Size box, two of my three plots come out the same size, while the third is slightly smaller.
If you're sure you're using "Specify Size" on all three plots, the problem is most likely that PowerPoint (or Word or whatever) is resizing the plot when you paste it. Word especially is bad about thinking it's smarter than you.

You might have better luck saving the plots as Enhanced Metafiles (emf) and importing those files rather than using the clipboard.

Sizing

Posted: Fri Aug 11, 2006 3:45 pm
by esporter
They're different sizes when I make a Multiple Print hard copy.
When I copy and paste into PowerPoint as a metafile, all the sizes are the same. I can get it from PowerPoint to Word by saving as a .png, but when I insert that into Word the line thicknesses aren't right. The problem is independent of file format.
Otherwise, it's perfect when I do it by hand.

Sorry for the confusion, I was trying to go from Print-to-file through pdf and back to word processor.

Posted: Fri Aug 11, 2006 4:07 pm
by DPlotAdmin
They're different sizes when I make a Multiple Print hard copy.
Ah... that's different. Check the print margins. Most likely the plot size is too large (with the addition of numbers, title lines, axis labels, etc.) to fit within the margins you have for the given paper size. When that occurs DPlot will scale everything down.

Having said that, though... from your description you probably still won't get the plots to line up along the Y axes even though they're the same size. DPlot unfortunately isn't making any effort to position the graph by the location of the axes, but by the corners of an imaginery box surrounding the entire plot. Unless the numbers along the Y axis and the Y axis labels for each plot are the same width, the axes won't line up. Strange that I've never really thought of this before; I need to change the alignment for the case of multiple plots on a page.