Plot Options

There are options that control the way the graphical output of a fit is displayed. This document discussed those options The options are:

• AxesLabel
• AxesOrigin
• ListPlotThreshold
• PlotLabel
• PlotRange

The Plot Options are accessed from the Graph Setup screen.

AxesLabel

By default, the axes of the plot are not labelled. The AxesLabel option allows you to label either or both of the axes. The relevant part of the Plot Options screen looks like this:

We choose to label both axes by changing the form to look like this:

Now the axes are labelled:

AxesOrigin

By default, Mathematica tries to do the sensible thing in placing the origin of the axes. Sometimes you may wish to change the default behavior. For example, here is some data on neuron behavior in rats:

If you wish to move the origin of the axes so that the axes are outside the range of the data, you may set the AxesOrigin option so that it looks like this:

Now the plot looks like:

You should be careful about using the AxesOrigin option when you should use the PlotRange one discussed below. For example, here is a plot of some radioactive dating calibration data:

Perhaps you wish the axes to go through the point 0,0. If you use the AxesOrigin option to choose that point, the result is:

Note that the horizontal axis has not extended itself to that origin. Instead, we keep the AxesOrigin option at its default value of Automatic, and set the horizontal PlotRange option to 0,30000. This results in a plot which is probably what is desired:

ListPlotThreshold

When the data contain no explicit errors and there are many data points, the plot of the data is produced by the Mathematica built-in function ListPlot. The size of the "dots" produced by ListPlot can be fairly small, depending on the display device; sometimes these points are difficult to see. Thus, when there are only a few data points, the plot of the data is produced by an internal program from the Experimental Data Analyst package which uses a larger diamond shaped "dot." The ListPlotThreshold option sets how many data points are necessary for ListPlot to be used.

Here is a plot 14 data points relating to the growth of the retina in cats:

We set the value of ListPlotThreshold to 13 by typing that number directly in the text field below:

Now the data points are represented by smaller dots:

PlotLabel

This option allows the plot of the data to have a label. For example, if we type into the text field below:

then the resulting plot is:

PlotRange

By default, the grapher chooses ranges for the vertical and horizontal axes that include all or most of the data with appropriate scaling. The PlotRange option allows you to override this default behavior.

The relevant part of the Plot Options screen looks like this:

Here is a graph of some thermocouple calibration data:

If, for some reason, you wish to display the vertical axis as symmetric from -3 to +3, then the relevant part of the Options screen would look like this:

Now the plot looks like this:

This document is Copyright © 1999, 2000 David M. Harrison. The screens are Copyright © 1999, 2000 Solomon R.C. Douglas and David M. Harrison. This is version 1.1, data (m/d/y) 03/19/00.