Beta 1.9.1.1

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Beta 1.9.1.1

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Beta version is available at [Edit: removed. Normal download includes these changes]. Licensed users must have version 1.9 or later installed before installing this version. If you're a licensed user not on the mailing list, contact me for instructions in getting version 1.9.1 before installing this beta.

Changes:
  • Added Redo command (compliment of Undo) and Redo toolbar button.
  • Added user preferences for time format on the Number Formats dialog. Previous versions of DPlot always used the time format specified with Windows' Control Panel International (Regional Settings on some Windows versions) applet.
  • Added a new line style for XY plots.
  • The BMP Picture file export plugin now does a much better job of preserving all colors in the picture. In previous versions, colors set with text formatting commands and colors associated with anti-aliasing symbols (as opposed to colors set explicitly in the color palette) may not have been preserved in the run-length-encoded 256-color bitmap.
  • Added a new Date and Time number format, which differs from 'Calendar Date' only in that the time value will always be displayed (if the time format string isn't blank), while 'Calendar Date' displays the time only under certain circumstances, mostly to do with the granularity of the data.
  • Added YYYYMMDDHHMM to Serial... command on the Edit menu for XY plots. This one requires a bit of explanation. There's been a request (in the Suggestions section of these forums) for accepting date/time groups as a single number in the form YYYYMMDDHHMM (for example the local date/time as I write this would be 200312281725), which would then be broken up into its component parts and displayed according to your Date and Time format settings. The initial effort involved adding a new number format that would parse these numbers and display the correct information. Although this worked, scaling these numbers on a plot correctly opens a fairly large can of worms, since there are large gaps of unused numbers. So... for now at least, if you want to import numbers in this format you must then translate these numbers to Excel 1900 date system values with the new menu command.

    In addition to performing the translation, this new command also sets the number format of the X axis to 'Date and Time' and your Time format string to something that DPlot deems appropriate. If, for example, your time formatting string is 'h:mm:ss tt' and the granularity of the input is 1 hour or greater, then DPlot changes the time format string to 'h tt'. If anyone thinks this automation is too intrusive, your comments are certainly welcome.

    If your date values don't include a year, then no year is displayed. There are a couple of gotchas associated with this, though. There's no way to distinguish leap years from non-leap years, so you may be missing a February 29th on your scale. And year 0 in the Excel 1900 date system is 1900. So there's no good way I can see to leave the year out and allow 1900 to be displayed. Actually 1901 can't be displayed, either - DPlot uses 1901 for the case of no year, and simply ignores the year if it is 1900 or 1901. I realize this is confusing - if you're interested in this sort of thing I think it will become apparent after you play with it a bit.
Comments and suggestions are welcome.
Last edited by DPlotAdmin on Thu Apr 20, 2006 7:08 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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A few bug fixes

Post by DPlotAdmin »

Beta 1.9.1.2 has been uploaded to [Edit: removed. Normal download includes these changes.] Again, licensed users must have version 1.9 or later installed before installing this version. If you're a licensed user not on the mailing list, contact me for instructions in getting version 1.9.1 before installing this beta.

Changes:
  • User-selected date format and time format settings were not properly saved to DPlot files when using the new Date and Time number format.
  • Cancel button on Y=f(X,Y1,Y2,...) dialog... didn't cancel.
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