17 June, 2009
Version 2.2.6.1

• By popular demand, added a quality setting for JPEG export. You will most likely find that the 4^th of the 5 settings ("qood", the previous default) is the minimum acceptable quality. The 5^th setting is lossless and so won't produce the artifacts common to JPEG files, but the file size is much larger.
   
• (Licensed version only). Improved initial guesses for the equation form Y=A(X+B)^C. Previous versions tended to blow up with data that had a negative slope. Also added the ability to specify the extents of the curve generated by the fit equation.
   
• Modified the Excel Add-In commands XYZSurface and XYZScatter to skip over blank cells: if any of the X,Y, or Z cells are empty, no point is added. Also added better error messages for finding bad numbers, rather than relying on Excel's generic "Type mismatch" errors.
   
• Bug fix: Zooming out with the mouse wheel might have caused DPlot to crash with a logarithmic scale.
   
• Bug fix: Fixed a few issues with writing %APPDATA%/DPlot/dplot.ini. In previous versions the file might have become mangled up by the macro editor.
   

2 June, 2009
Version 2.2.6.0

Very minor changes this time. Mailing list updates will not be sent. If you're a licensed user, you can get this update at the same link you received in the last update message, or with "Check for Updates" on the Help menu.

• Fixed the boundary between peridotites and pyroxenites on the new IUGS ultramafic rock classification scale for triangle plots, and made a few changes to the label placement on the mafic rock plot to give a bit more room for the Y and Z axis labels.
   
• Bug fix: Fixed a couple of minor problems with the List Peaks dialog. In particular for 3D/4D data you'd get semi-random characters in the output if you unchecked all options.
   

1 June, 2009
Version 2.2.5.9

• For triangle plots, added options to draw IUGS Mafic and Ultramafic boundaries and labels for geologists and other... rock people :-). This is a beta feature, waiting on input from all the geologists reading this. If you see something wrong, please let me know. (In particular, I'm unsure about the 50% olivine boundary between peridotites and pyroxenites shown on the ultramafic scale. This agrees with the orinal requester's examples, but not with anything I've found on the internet about the subject - every reference I've found says the boundary is at 40%. In a perfect world this update would have waited until I knew the answer, but the bug fixes shown below mandated an update.)
   
• For plots of 3D/4D data with shaded bands, roundoff error in the height of each legend entry might have resulted in the legend not being centered vertically on the plot, as intended. This was particularly noticeable with a large (>5 or so) legend label frequency.
   
• Arrows drawn from text notes (if any) are now drawn in the color specified for the note font. In previous versions the arrows were always black. This does not apply to colors specified within the note text - only to the colors specified on the Font dialog.
   
• Bug fix: An uninitialized data problem with all versions since 2.2.4.7 might have caused DPlot to crash when viewing polar charts that included a legend.
   
• Bug fix: Text notes on triangle plots with the position specified in data space were not positioned correctly.
   
• Bug fix: The Crop command on the Edit menu did not work correctly for 3D data if the plot used negative scale factors on the X or Y axes.
   

28 May, 2009
Version 2.2.5.7

• Added the ability to specify the symbol frequency for 3D/4D scatter plots, which was previously only supported for XY plots. The corresponding SymbolFrequency macro/DDE command now also works with 3D/4D scatter plots.
   
• Bug fix: In version 2.2.5.7 the new feature of turning on/off various values supplied by the List Peak Values and List Peaks within a Range commands left extra characters on the report screen.
   
• Bug fix: For 2D views of random 3D points in a surface plot and contour lines (as opposed to shaded bands), DPlot did not properly respect the Z extents set with Options>Extents/Intervals/Size: whatever contour intervals were specified, those lines were drawn.
   

23 May, 2009
Version 2.2.5.6

• The List Peak Values and List Peaks within a Range commands on the Info menu now allow you to specify what values to display. Choose from Minimum, Maximum, Mean, Standard Deviation, and (for XY plots) Standard Error. The default of course is to display all those values. This might save a bit of editing time if you typically use the output of these operations in a text note or export that information to another application.
   
• Changed the behavior of dropping files onto DPlot. When dropping a file onto an open document window, the file is appended to that document rather than opening a new document. When dropping a file outside a document window the operation is the same as in all previous versions: a new document window is opened.
   
• Bug fix: Version 2.2.5.2 introduced a new bug when interpreting blank columns in text files. A single character was erroneously interpreted as a blank cell. So if, for example, your X column was the row number, DPlot would skip over the first 9 rows of data.
   

18 May, 2009
Version 2.2.5.5

• Bug fix: Due to a recent goof, if you attempted to save a bitmap image (BMP, GIF, JPG, PNG, TIF) and specified a resolution greater than 100 dpi and used non-zero dimensions for the width and height, the plot fonts, line widths, symbol sizes, plot size, etc. were scaled up (as expected) by <resolution>/<display resolution>, but the output image dimensions were not scaled up. The resulting image was of the requested size, but only included the top left portion of the plot. It also took (depending on the resolution setting) quite a bit longer to draw than usual, because most of the plot was clipped.
   

17 May, 2009
Version 2.2.5.4

• Bug fix: The new (2.2.5.3) feature allowing you to zoom in/out on 2D plots using your mouse wheel did not pay attention to the size of the table used to store zoom extents. If you zoomed more than 10 times with the mouse wheel w/o clicking the Zoom Out button on the toolbar or using the Zoom Out menu command, DPlot would overwrite other data, leading to strange behavior and possibly a crash.
   
• Added a checkbox to the General Options menu command to disable zooming with the mouse wheel, for those who find this feature annoying and/or who frequently unintentionally scroll the mouse wheel. Programmatically this same feature is available with the GeneralOptions command.
   

14 May, 2009
Version 2.2.5.3

• You can now zoom in/out on 2D plots using your mouse wheel.
   
• Made several changes to the "Specify columns to plot" dialog boxes:
  • Modified the dialog box so that it works as expected for line lengths greater than 1024 characters. Previous versions wrapped at the 1024'th character (same as Notepad and any other application using the standard Windows edit control), making it just about impossible to tell what you were looking at.
     
  • You can now read files containing up to 256 columns, though the total limit on the number of curves is unchanged at 100. In previous versions you could not read a file containing more than 101 columns (for XY plots, 1 X plus 100 Y columns).
     
  • For XY plots the "Use these columns for Y" list now displays column headings in addition to the column index.
     
  • For XY plots the dialog box is now resizable, and if you increase/decrease the width then the "Use these columns for Y" list box is resized along with the dialog box. This is handy for long, somewhat similar column headings that are not shown in their entirety in the table headings.
     
• Added a step plot plugin for the full version. If you elect to install this plugin you'll see "Make Step Plot" on the Generate menu.
   
• Minor change to the XYYY Excel Add-In command: In previous versions the first row was used as axis labels or legend entries only if the first column, first row contained a text entry. In this version this cell may be blank, with subsequent columns in the first row containing Y labels.
   
• Bug fix: There was a roundoff problem with small amplitudes on XY plots with "Specify interval". For example if you set the interval to 2.E-11 and the Y extents to 0 to 2.E-10, DPlot would erroneously determine that the high extent was less than the low extent plus some multiple (in this case 10) of the tick interval, and increase the high extent (to, in this case, 2.2E-10).
   
• Bug fix: A change in version 2.2.4.6 (not erasing the background of a document window when the plot was updated, thereby making 3D animations much smoother) might have given the appearance that DPlot had crashed, when it was actually operating just fine (though with an inappropriate background). You might have run into this when, for example, creating a plot from scratch with the Edit Data command and hitting Cancel rather than OK. You'd be left with a picture of the Edit Data dialog and a depressed Cancel button. The plot in this case was not redrawn, since there was nothing to draw.
   

3 May, 2009
Version 2.2.4.8

• Bug fix: There were two problems associated with version 2.2.4.7's allowing two significant figures when zooming in on logarithmic scales: 1) Roundoff errors might have resulted in the low extent being equal to the high extent, which resulted in a division by 0 error and subsequent crash. 2) DPlot did a poor job of finding the space required on the left side of a plot for the Y axis values after zooming. With the default extents (use as much of the display as possible) this might have resulted in numbers being clipped at the left edge of the screen (and the right edge if multiple axes were used).
   

1 May, 2009
Version 2.2.4.7

• Added a blog. This will for the most part be used to echo support e-mail questions that seem to come up frequently.
   
• Added Both lines and shades option for 3D/4D surface plots drawn in 2D. If selected, black lines are drawn at the boundaries between shaded bands. These lines are optionally labeled in the same way that "Contour lines" plots are.
   
• For 3D points on a rectangular grid drawn in 2D, amended the interpolation scheme for "Shaded bands". This was done to accommodate the above "Both lines and shades" option. In previous versions shaded bands used a bilinear interpolation scheme, while contour lines broke each grid rectangle up into 4 planar triangles with the center point being the average of the 4 corners. The bilinear method generally produced smoother-looking contours for sparse data, but that smoothness wasn't based on any insight into the data and so probably wasn't justified. In any case the bands did not match up with contour lines; in this version they do.
   
• Added a "Minor line width" option for 2D surface plots. You can set the interval for "major" lines using the "Major lines every" control. As before, labels will be drawn on lines at this interval if the "Label every major line" box is checked.
   
• Added "Preserve Scale" option to the Contour Options and Scatter Plot Options dialog. This setting is equivalent to the Preserve3DScaleFactor macro/DDE command, and in this context is only meaningful if after closing this dialog you use the CTRL+arrow keys keyboard shortcuts to spin the plot. If checked, then the next time this plot is drawn the scale factor used to force the plot into the specified extents (or the available document area if extents are not specified with Extents/Intervals/Size) will be used on all subsequent renderings when spinning the plot around using the keyboard shortcuts. This option is primarily useful for smooth animations; if this option is not used then the plot size will tend to increase/decrease and possibly shift left, right, up, or down as you spin it around using the keyboard shortcuts. Note that this may mean that portions of the plot will be clipped when using this option. For best results first select viewing angles that will make the plot take up the largest portion of screen space - typically this will be at azimuths of 45, 135, 225, or 315 degrees.
   
• Added right-click menu items for 3D surface plots in a 3D view. You can now quickly switch to a surface plot, wireframe plot, and for 3D points on a rectangular grid to a waterfall plot or bar chart. In practice this feature is mostly useful for switching to a wireframe plot before making changes to the viewpoint using the CTRL+arrow keys shortcuts.
   
• You can now control the size of the symbols used in surface plots when "Data points" is checked on the Contour Options dialog. Programmatically the size may be set with [SymbolSize(1,<size in 1000'ths of inches>].
   
• Amended the Color macro/DDE command to include support for setting the color of border lines used on 3D/4D surface plots.
   
• On 2D views, all plot types, if you used the Print Caption option on the Text menu to display the plot filename in the lower right corner of the plot, that caption might have overlapped the numbers along the X axis.
   
• For logarithmic scales on XY plots, DPlot would not allow you to zoom in to extents that were not 5 or 10 times some power of 10. In this release you can zoom in to extents with 2 significant figures.
   
• Bug fix: DPlot did not correctly parse clipboard text with a date in the first column, time in the second column. In this version pasting this data from the clipboard behaves the same way that reading that data from a file would: the date and time are combined to form the X values.
   
• Bug fix: If you clicked OK on the Label Points dialog for 3D data and there were no labels, DPlot crashed.
   
• Bug fix: If you used the Specify Extents option on the Extents/Intervals/Size command with a logarithmic scale, for some values DPlot might have displayed the wrong value due to a small roundoff error. For example 1E-9 might have been displayed as 1.01E-9.
   
• Bug fix: If you used a single custom contour level of 0 with surface plots and re-opened the Contour Levels dialog, DPlot crashed with a division by 0 error.
   
• Bug fix: In previous versions DPlot automatically cropped metafiles and enhanced metafiles, eliminating excess white space. In most cases of course this was a good thing. But when driving DPlot from another program, retrieving a metafile from DPlot and setting that picture to be the background of a picture frame in that application, the resulting plot might not have had the expected aspect ratio. This was particularly noticeable with polar plots, which might not have been circular. In this release you (or rather your program) will get the metafile it asks for, including white space.
  Somewhat related: Amended the VB btest4 and C ctest4 demo programs distributed with DPlot Jr to request a metafile size more in synch with the picture frame dimensions. Previous versions forced the width to 5 inches and the height was set proportional to the width, according to the relative frame dimensions. This worked fine for frames with an aspect ratio smaller than w/h = 5/3. The only trouble was that DPlot forces both the width and height to be at least 3 inches, so wide frames would end up producing distorted plots.
   

15 April, 2009
Version 2.2.4.6

• Made one simple change that makes version 2.2.4.2's keyboard shortcuts for changing view angles on 3D views much more useful: In this release the document window background is not erased when updating the plot. Instead the previous view is retained until the new plot has been calculated/drawn to a bitmap, and that bitmap is then BLT'ed to the screen. So you can spin a 3D view around without a lot of annoying screen-flashing. For bar charts, scatter plots, wireframes and waterfall plots, if antialiasing is turned off you'll now get a smooth animation using the arrow keys. (Surface plots are a bit sluggish because DPlot draws every individual pixel.)
   
• Another change related to the view angle keyboard shortcuts: when making a series of changes using those keys, only the first keypress results in an Undo file being saved. So if, for example, you spin a plot through 50 degrees with 50 CTRL+←'s then click the Undo button once, the view angles will be restored to the values that existed before those 50 operations.
   
• Added ContourViewChange command, which changes the viewing azimuth and/or elevation angles for 3D views by the specified values in degrees.
   
• A change in behavior for 3D bar charts: If "Borders" on the Contour Options dialog is unchecked, then bars will not be outlined in black. This change was made primarily for viewing bar charts at an elevation angle of 90 degrees (top-down) where the black lines might have overwhelmed the plot for more than a thousand or so data points.
   
• DPlot does a much better job with saving high resolution images, particularly with plots for which the legend or a text note has been moved well outside the extents of the plot. If you elected to crop whitespace in the image, those text entries might have been cropped or left completely out of the image. In at least some cases attempting to save a high resolution image with text objects well to the left or above the plot might have resulted in a crash.
   
• Improved placement of axis labels and numbers on 3D views. In previous versions the labels sometimes overlapped the numbers along the axes, and/or the numbers overlapped the corresponding axis.
   
• Bug fix: When using "Symbol sizes in Z units" for 3D scatter plots, DPlot erroneously applied the Z scale factor to the symbol sizes twice. For very small scale factors this error might have caused an integer overflow and subsequent crash.
   
• Bug fix: In many cases DPlot did not interpret column headings for 3D/4D data files correctly.
   

8 April, 2009
Version 2.2.4.2

• Bug fix: The legend entries for median-based 1D box-and-whisker plots were fouled up starting with version 2.2.3.5.
   
• Bug fix: Axis labels were drawn in the incorrect location on 3D views with an elevation of 0 degrees.
   
• Beta feature: Not documented anywhere but here (yet): For 3D views you can use Ctrl + ←, →, ↑, ↓ keys to increment/decrement the azimuth/elevation by 1 degree. This feature of course works best with simple plots: a few thousand points or less, antialiasing turned off, no lighting for surface plots.