labels on x-axis of a chart

[mike newman <m newman qmul ac uk>]

Hello,

There seems to be a strange behaviour in the labelling of the x-axis ticks 
on a chart in gnumeric 1.4.3

Consider a "large" chart, i.e., when there would not be enough room to fit 
all the labels.  One nice way to deal with this is to cleverly omit some 
labels.  For instance column $A contains dates for one year (daily); in 
column $B put
        =if(day(A1)>0,A1,"")
Using column $B for data labels results in one label for the first of each 
month and blanks elsewhere.

I used this on older versions, but was recently upgraded from an ancient 
OS to brand new Mandriva with gnumeric 1.4.3.

Now it seems that gnumeric takes an educated guess at how many labels will 
fit, and omits some.  The problem is it doesn't seem to notice that most 
of them are blank, and so will print every tenth-or-so label without 
noticing that it is mostly printing blanks.  Gnumeric seems to be doing 
some kind of adaptive heuristic to figure out how many labels to omit each 
time (it's not quite constant) even though it could fit them all (since 
most are blank).  After a bit of guesswork I can work out which blanks are 
being printed and put something there, which then shows up on the chart.

I noticed that gnumeric now has an option "Categories between ticks" and 
"Categories between labels".  These don't quite do what I want (months 
have different number of days in them).  I tried setting these to 0 or 1 
so that nothing would be omitted, but the behaviour of the previous 
paragraph kicks in.

This occurs even if I replace my column $B with straight text entries on 
the first of each month and genuine empty cells otherwise.

NB: I tried using my old file and starting a new one from scratch, same 
result.

Arguably this is a "feature" (it's certainly better than superimposing all 
365 dates!) but IMHO I like the first-of-the-month trick above.

Apologies for the long post, and any help appreciated!

mike