Thanks (More plotting comments)

In the technical sense of S graphics you want to include figure regions
not plot regions in other publications.  (In years of doing this
and scores of publications I have only once moved the axis labels.)

I guess there is something I'm not understanding here. If I draw a diagram
in xfig and export to eps then it exports exactly that diagram, trimmed
right to the edges of whatever lines are in that picture. Then I import
it into Latex which takes the bounding box and presumes everything in that
box is picture. Latex then adds a little space before and after the picture,
and centres the picture in the column of text. I add the caption under the
figure at the Latex stage rather than have it built into the figure because
that provides automatic figure numbering, font consistency, indexing,
references in the text, etc.