Canvas size

In earlier versions of gnuplot, some terminal types (but not all) used the values from set size to control also the size of the output canvas. This behaviour is now deprecated. In future versions of gnuplot the options 'set size' and 'set term 5#5foo6#6 size' will have complementary effects:

set term 5#5terminal_type6#6 size 5#5XX6#6, 5#5YY6#6 controls the size of the output file, or "canvas". Please see individual terminal documentation for allowed values of the size parameters. By default, the plot will fill this canvas.

set size 5#5XX6#6, 5#5YY6#6 scales the plot itself relative to the size of the canvas. Scale values less than 1 will cause the plot to not fill the entire canvas. Scale values larger than 1 will cause only a portion of the plot to fit on the canvas. Please be aware that setting scale values larger than 1 may cause problems on some terminal types.

Example:

     set term pbm size 600, 400
     set size 0.5, 0.5
     set output "figure.pbm"
     plot "data" with lines

These commands will produce an output file "figure.pbm" that is 600 pixels wide and 400 pixels tall. The plot will fill the lower left quarter of this canvas. This is consistent with the way multiplot mode has always worked, however it is a change in the way some drivers worked for single plots in version 4.0.

Most terminal drivers in 4.2 follow the new convention. However the behaviour of the png/jpeg/gif driver is under the control of a configuration option. See backwards compatibility (p. ).