@MichaelE2 I am guessing you meant to write Introduced in 10.1 on mathematica.stackexchange.com/q/80696/121 unless I am missing an important comment?

@Szabolcs No. I already used both ways of accessing results that are not immediately returned in earlier projects: (1) having one global library instance that is assigned every time you call a function and you can access them by calling a global getResult or (2) creating instances with each call where you have to remember the pointer to the objects and manage deletion yourself.

I'm sure you have put already some thought into this and there is nothing I can substantially add at this stage (and without having used WolframLibrary myself for quite some time).

So almost all plot themes disable axes labels, and none of those that allow axes labels put the x axis label underneath the x axis, or the plot legend anywhere near the plot. Tedious.

Much easier to just generate plot data in Mathematica, then copy and paste grid of data as plain text into Excel for charting, styling, and sending.

@MichaelHale No they don't, but it is confusing. Take PlotTheme -> "Web", for example:

In[204]:= Options[
 Plot[x, {x, 0, 1}, PlotTheme -> "Web"], {Axes, Frame}]

Out[204]= {Axes -> {False, False},
 Frame -> {{True, False}, {True, False}}}

So, to supply a label, you need to use FrameLabel not AxesLabel.

In[206]:= Options[
 Plot[x, {x, 0, 1}, PlotTheme -> "Web",
  FrameLabel -> Automatic], FrameLabel]

Out[206]= {FrameLabel -> {{\!\(\*
TagBox[
InterpretationBox[
StyleBox[
GraphicsBox[{},
BaselinePosition->Baseline,
ImageSize->{0, 0}],
CacheGraphics->False],
Spacer[0]],
HoldForm]\), None}, {\!\(\*
TagBox["x",
HoldForm]\), None}}}

Or, in more readable terms, it puts x on the x-axis, as you expect.

@rcollyer Oh, wow. I had no idea about FrameLabel vs AxesLabel. I'd only ever used AxesLabel. Very good to know, thanks.

@MichaelHale not an issue. I think this is a common issue with themes. Would you post it on main?

@rcollyer Well now I don't know what my question would be. I guess it would be why was I always using AxesLabel instead of Frame + FrameLabel.

If you use AxesLabel then turning on a PlotTheme can be confusing, but if you have been using Frame + FrameLabel then it will work very well.

@MichaelHale good points

ok. we'll let them suffer. :D

You cruel, cruel man. :D

yep.

I think I just got stuck that way because the documentation for Plot and ListPlot just show examples with short labels and use AxesLabel, so I saw that and never paid attention to FrameLabel.

makes sense, especially since the themes use Frame quite a bit.

I suppose that warrants a mention in the pitfall thread…

Right. But maybe the docs for ListPlot or something should give a relatively prominent example using FrameLabel, because for every real-world data scenario I've encountered, it seems FrameLabel is what I want instead of AxesLabel, which only seems appropriate for very short, mathematical or unit labels.

Technically, they should add some logic to their option-setting "meta-algorithms" to automatically set Frame to something reasonable if something is provided for FrameLabel.

maybe.

I'll probably still end up using Excel for now though because getting the plot out of Mathematica takes so many extra steps.

ouch.

Legends aren't included if you copy and paste the graphic and the quality degrades horribly.

So you have to export cell as PNG and import into email, or print screen and cut from paint or something.

yes. unfortunately.

Whereas if you are with an organization using Outlook, the integration with Excel is so nice that you can copy and paste a chart and then resize in the email and the axes will relabel based on scale, etc. So I think I will for now still have to take raw data export from SQL Server to CSV, load CSV into Mathematica, process and transform, copy grid as plaintext into Excel, chart, copy into email.

I guess the good news is that I'm so much faster at the processing and transforming in Mathematica than Excel that it's worth fitting it into the pipeline at all.

@MichaelHale you could use DatabaseLink, instead of dumping to CSV.

@rcollyer I've used that for personal projects before, but in this case Mathematica is on a separate machine that can't access the DB. Also, these are for one time requests. If I was using the same query over and over, I definitely put it into R or hopefully someday Mathematica for automation. But for writing query the first time, the syntax highlighting and auto-completion in dedicated SQL query editor is nice.

@MichaelHale true, very true.

I get stuck trying to get Alignment and BaselinePosition to do what I want every single time I try to use them.

How can I take the content of a cell (e.g. NotebookRead@First@Cells[]) and return a string? I want to export code as text for example, programmatically. But how to?

@Pickett

// First // ToExpression // InputForm // ToString

Maybe

How can I get the "a b" to go to the top in the following?

Framed@Row[{Framed@Graphics[Circle[], ImageSize -> 400],
   Framed@Column[{"a", "b"}]}]

@MichaelHale That evaluates the expression, so if my code is Plot[Sin[x], {x, 0, 2 Pi}] then that code returns Graphics[...] instead of "Plot[Sin...]". However I have realized that I only need a subset of Box tags so I will define those manually, which I think will solve the problem.

@Pickett You can use Hold as third argument to ToExpression to prevent evaluation. Not sure if that helps you.

@MichaelHale I'll take a look at it, thank you.

Ah, right. Forget Row. Always use Grid if trying to align things.