The first tab is used to set the general scales used for two or three axis plots.
In this tab, you can set the number of ticks used for each axis. This can be done in two ways: 1) Set the number of labels to use for the entire scale. Whatever number you enter, QtiPlot may adjust the value so as to produce a prettier plot (for example, if you enter 7 ticks for a 0..100 scale, QtiPlot will use 10 major ticks spaced evenly from 10 to 100). 2) Set the Step Increment and QtiPlot will generate as many ticks as needed to fill the scale range using the indicated increment. This produces tick spacings and labels which are more like those that are typically done on hand drawn graphs.
The grid tab is used to draw grid lines on the plot. The frequency of the lines are related to the number of labels and major ticks set with the Scale tab.
The third tab is used to modify the setting of the different axes. You must select the axis to be customized in the right window. The label of that axis can then be modified in the title window - see the text options dialog section for more details.
The General settings tab is used to customize global aspects of the plot. The canvas is the area bounded by the axes. You can draw a box around this canvas and define its background color. The background area is the global drawing area of the graph window. You can also define a color border and a background color for this area as well. The margin parameter controls the distance between the drawing area limit and the canvas. If you want to modify the margin between the window limits and the drawing area, you must modify the layer parameters (manually with the mouse or with the arrange layers dialog.
The parameters in the Axes group allow modification of the linestyle used to draw the axes and ticks.