The only thing that the previous mail answered is that to use minimumExtent. I don't understand how to make that work.
The difference is that I don't know if the tick label is going to be 5 pixels long or 50 pixels long and I don't want to set the minimumExtent to be 50 pixels all of the time. It seems like having the ability to make one of the methods above have a virtual function is the way to go.
Since you, Uwe, designed and wrote it, why didn't you make some of the functions virtual like the QwtScaleDraw::getBorderDistHint() function?
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