gnuplot ignores x and y ranges when using dgrid3d

Question

I have a file with scattered data (points located approximatelly on the vertices of a regular grid): first two columns are the x and y coordinates, then a few more columns with other data that I need to plot. I want to obtain color maps that represent this data, and since points are scattered I'm using dgrid3d to generate a regular grid and have a smoother representation. My problem is that when I set dgrid3d, gnuplot ignores the x and y ranges and plot the grid outside the figure frame. Bellow is a minimal script to reproduce my problem:

set view map
set yrange [0.4:0.8]
set xrange [0.2:0.8]
set pm3d 
set style data lines
set dgrid3d 100,100,4
splot "./Terr.dat" using 1:2:(log($6)) pal

The result that I obtain is the following image:

Setting the option clip1in or clip4in of pm3d has no effect. If I unset view so that the result is a 3D surface, it also ignores the x and y ranges. I could easily write an script to pre-process the data and remove the points outside the range I want, but gnuplot should be able to manage this. Any idea?

I'm using gnuplot 4.2 patchlevel 6

Thanks!

Answer 1

I'm not sure that I am able to reproduce your problem, but there are a few funny things with your script. I'm not exactly sure what the line set style data lines is supposed to do in this context as you're plotting with pm3d. I created a simple datafile:

0 1 4
1 0 5
0 0 2
1 1 3

And I plotted it using this script:

set view map
set yrange [0.4:0.8]
set xrange [0.2:0.8]
set dgrid3d 100,100,4
splot 'test.dat' u 1:2:3 w pm3d

And it seemed to "work" (I'm using gnuplot 4.6.0).

There are a few things of note however -- Notice that every point in my original domain was out of the given x and y ranges. Gnuplot still used those points when constructing the surface. This is also demonstrates reasonably nicely what the gnuplot weighting function looks like (although we could do even better by using only 1 point in our data file.)

---

UPDATE

Between my 2 computers, I have access to gnuplot4.2.6, gnuplot4.3.0, gnuplot4.4.2, gnuplot4.6.0, gnuplot4.6.1 and gnuplot4.7.0. gnuplot4.2.6 is the only version which exhibits the behavior you describe. It looks to me like they changed the behavior of pm3d in the 4.3 CVS branch, but didn't push those changes back into gnuplot4.2. The easy fix is to upgrade to gnuplot4.6 -- I've been using it as my default gnuplot for a few months now and it seems to be pretty stable.