Axis Titles

Although "MyFirstPlot" has gained a lot of clarity compared to its first appearance on the screen, we are not completely content. "X Title" and "Y Title" are not very helpful, and having a trailing zero after the decimal point seems to be a little bit pointless.

We can tackle this by the next two dialogs which branch from the "Axes" entry in the dialog tree. The first of them, the "Titles" dialog, provides some means for formatting the axis titles. With the help of the "Position" frame, you can adjust the position of the label. You also can rotate the label by some angle different from 900. Figure 3-15 has already some entries in the respective textboxes which provide a good position for the label. Another possibility of positioning the labels exists in dragging them with the mouse into the desired position.

By use of the "Properties" frame we can, e.g., change the text color of the label. As you can see from Figure 3-15, the color has been already changed to red. This is because we want to make the color of the y axis title correspond with the color of the graph data which we will change to red later on.

In the last frame we can change text font and size. According to the settings in Figure 3-15 we choose Helvetica 18 point.

But what's that! Hieroglyphs?! "Intensity \gF\N\s0 \N[arb. units]" does not seem to make so much sense. Let me explain this. SciGraphica provides some means to make use of special characters, superscripts and subscripts and the like as well as basic formatting (bold, italic) for axis titles, tick labels etc. The way this is done is to use tags which switch these features on and off. The "\g" tag switches on greek letters. Thus, \gF is equivalent to the greek letter Phi. To switch back to the normal font, one uses the "\N" tag. The "\s" tag switches subscript on, the "\S" tag stands for Superscript.

You can just type these tags into the "Label" textbox. The other way is to click on one of the buttons to enter the respective tag into the textbox. Just play around with it to find out which tag each of the buttons represents. If you are through, click the "Apply" button.

Click the "Bottom" tab to switch to the bottom axis dialog. Enter "Frequency [kHz]" into the "Label" textbox and adjust font and size to Helvetica 18 point. Click the "Apply" button. The graph should now look like Figure 3-16.