aspect ratios...

hi.  i'm a long-time (and mostly silent) ratpoison user.  in general,
i'm very happy with it.  (thus, long time, mostly silent...)

but, whenever i'm doing anything graphical, i tend to get annoyed.  for
example, i'll output a graphic in R.  when i *first* switch to the
window with the graphic, the graphic itself is the right aspect ratio,
living in a small part of a window which itself fills up whatever frame
it is in.  if i then hit some key, the graphic grows to fill up the
frame, changing its aspect ratio.

similar aspect ratio badness happens in other cases.  (below is a simple
gnuplot script; the circles should circles, not ellipses.)

i see there is something called an "aspect ratio hint" an application
could give, that might cause ratpoison to honor that.  but, given the
number of applications that have this problem, i wonder if there is
something we could do?  i was thinking of something like "unmanaged",
but still manage the windows, but keep the aspect ratio as (implicitly?
(*)) specified by the application.  i.e., the window would have the
largest size possible within the frame given the aspect ratio wanted by
the application.

any thoughts?

cheers, Greg Minshall
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(*) my X11-programming skills have long since atrophied, so i'm not sure
how to infer the application's desire aspect ratio.  maybe from the
"width" and "height" arguments to XCreateWindow?
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here's the gnuplot example:
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set polar
set grid polar 
unset xtics
unset ytics
set border 0
set style fill solid 0.5
set rrange [0.1 : 4]
set size square
set key title "bounding radius 2.5"
set key outside top right samplen 0.7
plot 3.+sin(t)*cos(5*t) with filledcurve above r=2.5 notitle,\
     3.+sin(t)*cos(5*t) with line
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