http://www.dplot.com DPlot Graph Software for Scientists and Engineers Sat, 12 Nov 2011 07:00:00 GMT en-us Copyright 2001-2011 HydeSoft Computing, LLC. David Hyde admin@dplot.com http://www.dplot.com/logo_small.png http://www.dplot.com 141 45 Graph Software for Scientists and Engineers http://www.dplot.com/revisions.htm#R2320

12 November 2011
Version 2.3.2.0

• "Standard error about the line" feature of the Polynomial Curve Fit command now includes values for both base 10 logarithm and natural logarithm if a logarithmic Y scale is input.
   
• Added a "Previous point" option to the Differentiate command on the Generate menu. This method calculates the derivative as y_j' = (y_j - y_j-1)/(x_j - x_j-1)
   
• Added the ability to hide individual legend entries in XY plots (but not the associated curve).
   
• The SRTM file import plugin now takes the northeast corner of the area of interest as input rather than the width/height in seconds.
   
• The "Distance from" command on the Info menu now behaves in the same way for 3D data viewed in 2D with "Degrees, Minutes" or "Degrees, Minutes, Seconds" number formats as it does for XY plots: distance is reported in miles, kilometers, and nautical miles.
   
• Added descriptions to the DPlot Help file for Generate plugins that are distributed with DPlot. (Note that several of these plugins have their own more complete Help files accessible from the associated plugin dialog box.)
   
• If you previously used the Save Preferences command on a plot containing one or more notes, subsequent use of the Get Preferences command with that settings file would create new note(s), even if those notes were identical to those already present (location, text, various settings).
   
• You may now add reference lines to 2D views of 3D data.
   
• Modified the Operate on X and Operate on Y commands to add a shortcut for the 1-based point index J. For example, X=0.25*j will make X values evenly-spaced at 0.25: 0.25, 0.5, 0.75, etc. This shortcut is only valid for 2D data.
   
• Inserted code to properly not prompt the user for a filename when using [FilePrint("Adobe PDF","<filename>")] on 64-bit versions of Windows.
   
• Added a switch for 3D and 4D data to suppress the default behavior of drawing > and/or < symbols in the legend when the corresponding data extent was greater/less than one contour interval than the high/low contour level. Modified the ContourLegend macro/DDE command to take account of this capability.
   
• DPlot Viewer now includes the Hide Curves and Unhide all Curves commands on the View menu.
   
• Previous versions did not allow you to set the number format for the amplitude axis on 4D surface or scatter plots. This version does.
   
• Bug fix: The Move to top and Move to bottom buttons on the Reorder Curves dialog have never worked properly.
   
• Bug fix: The EditFilter macro command could only be run on one curve at a time, regardless of what you specified with the SelectCurve command.
   
• Bug fix: The SRTM plugin did not correctly handle west longitudes and south latitudes if you opened one of these files by drag/drop or by double-clicking the file in Explorer. (It worked as expected when using File>Open.)
   
• Bug fix: The S8 component of the Option 4 low-pass filter had an error in the two-pass option.
   
• Bug fix: A change in version 2.3.1.6 to handle lots of data points in bar charts (lots being defined as more than the number of pixels across the plot) broke horizontal bar charts.
   
• Bug fix: Under some circumstances the function parser would crash with an equation containing the sequence "+-", as in "Y=2.3*X+-0.5*X^2". In this release "+-" is properly handled as "-" and "--" as "+".
   

]]> http://www.dplot.com/revisions.htm#R2317

6 August 2011
Version 2.3.1.7

• The Number Formats command now works as you'd expect with the Z and amplitude values.
   
• The Move/Copy Curves dialog is now resizable, to help accommodate long names for existing graphs.
   
• Bug fix: Several dialog boxes incorrectly interpreted "Time of day (fractional days)" number format as "Time of day (hours)", so that the associated coordinate was off by a factor of 24.
   
• Bug fix: Reference lines with "At Value" set to "X2=" or "Y2=" were in some cases not saved properly, and when re-read had "At Value" set to "X=".
   
• Bug fix: Negative amplitudes on a stacked bar chart might have resulted in one-pixel gaps between negative bars.
   
• Bug fix: Bar charts crashed if a plot included only a single point or if you selected Edit Data on an empty plot for which Bar Chart scaling had been selected.
   

]]> http://www.dplot.com/revisions.htm#R2314

3 July 2011
Version 2.3.1.4

• Bug fix: For 2D contour plots of random 3D data, if you unchecked "Label every major line" then an uninitialized data problem might have caused a crash.
   
• Bug fix: If multiple XY curves existed and you deleted any curves other than the last, DPlot might have fouled up curve associations, e.g. a point label previously associated with curve 5 might now be associated with curve 4.
   
• Bug fix: With a negative tick mark interval (decreasing values from left-to-right or bottom-to-top) DPlot might have displayed 0 as some very small number, e.g. 2.2546E-16.
   

]]> http://www.dplot.com/revisions.htm#R2313

11 June 2011
Version 2.3.1.3

• DPlot generally does a better job of preventing images placed outside plot extents from being clipped. On your display those images might still be clipped depending on plot size, image size and location, but should not be clipped within saved or copied bitmaps or metafiles.
   
• Bug fix: Graphs containing large filled areas and copied to the Clipboard or saved as a metafile might have caused DPlot to crash. Apparently there is an undocumented limitation with standard metafiles and painted regions which you dare not exceed. The fix is to skip copying a standard Windows metafile to the Clipboard and not show "Windows metafile" in the "Save as type" list if any fill regions are used. Enhanced metafiles are still copied to the Clipboard and saved as before.
   
• Bug fix: The "More Curve Fits" plugin module might have crashed with an untrapped overflow error when using the equation form y=A + Be^Cx.
   

]]> http://www.dplot.com/revisions.htm#R2311

28 May 2011
Version 2.3.1.1

• Modified Average All Curves and Median of All Curves commands to only operate on visible (as opposed to hidden) curves.
   
• Added the complementary error function ERFC to the functions available with Y=f(X) and similar commands. The complementary error function is defined as erfc(x)=1 - erf(x).
   
• The List Peaks command now includes median, skewness, and kurtosis values (for Y in XY plots, Z in 3D plots, amplitude in 4D plots). Median, skewness, and kurtosis are also output for "List Peaks Within a Range" on XY plots. Also for the latter command, added a bit of slop so that plot extents would be included in the desired extents. In previous versions in most cases the low or high extents would not be exactly equal to the corresponding plot extents, due to roundoff error in converting mouse coordinates to plot coordinates.
   
• For file type D (multiple column text files, XY data) added a Heading rows have prefix entry to the Open dialog box. This allows you to specify a prefix character string that tells DPlot that any line including this prefix is definitely not data. In previous versions it was possible to confuse DPlot about where the data started if the heading contained information that could be confused as columns of numbers.
   
• For 4D surface and scatter plots, you may now specify a label for the 4th dimension. If used, this label will be drawn at the top of the legend using the legend font. Added corresponding AAxisLabel macro/DDE command.
   
• Added "4D Surface" and "4D Scatter" commands to the Excel Add-In.
   
• Added Poincare Plot optional plugin for the licensed version.
   
• Bug fix: When pasting 4D data, DPlot erroneously used the 4th column heading as the Z axis label.
   
• Bug fix: Under some circumstances the legend in 3D/4D plots might have been cropped when copying to the Clipboard, and the same problem might have left out or inappropriately cropped the date in the upper right corner and/or the filename in the lower right corner.
   
• Bug fix: If you used a second X axis at the top of a plot (via the Multiple Axes command) and set the number format for the lower X axis to "None", the upper X axis values might have overlapped any title lines.
   
• Bug fix: In some cases date/time groups on the Specify Columns to Plot dialog were not drawn, appearing as blank columns.
   
• Bug fix: In previous versions for 4D data the "Always auto-adjust scale factors for 3D plots" in many cases used the extents of the amplitude (4^th dimension) rather than Z to find appropriate scale factors. This might have resulted in exceptionally tall & skinny or short & wide plots.
   

]]> http://www.dplot.com/revisions.htm#R2310

10 April 2011
Version 2.3.1.0

• Bug fix: If Print Caption on the Text menu for 1D plots was checked, plots copied to the clipboard might have had the filename overlapping the labels on the horizontal axis.
   
• Bug fix: If you dragged-and-dropped a text file with multiple columns of numbers onto DPlot and Pick Columns to Plot was not the default setting, DPlot saw the first column as Y values with X starting at 0 and incremented by 1, rather than the more usual X in the first column.
   

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11 March 2011
Version 2.3.0.9

• Bug fix: This one has been present for a while, unfortunately. On XY plots if you allowed DPlot to pick a tick mark interval (the default), then for large extents a bonehead test and rounding problem might have extended the extents by one interval over those specified when that was not necessary. For example if you specified extents of 0 to 2 million and the default tick mark interval was 100,000, usually the upper extent would be adjusted to 2.1 million. Thanks to Howard Katz of Anatek for pointing out the problem.
   
• Bug fix: Not much of a bug, but the last update included a MessageBox reporting the time required to run an FFT, which of course was meant for our use in updating the Help file topic and should have been removed.
   
• DPlot Jr no longer includes the "Buy DPlot" menu command on the main menu bar. Given how DPlot Jr is used by the majority, this feature wasn't appropriate.
   

]]> http://www.dplot.com/revisions.htm#R2308

6 March 2011
Version 2.3.0.8

• Line breaks are now supported for point labels.
   
• Added Rank plugin to the Generate menu. This feature is roughly equivalent to Excel's PERCENTRANK function.
   
• Added Average Curve with Error Bars plugin to the Generate menu. This plugin produces a new document with Y equal to the mean of all Y values at any X within a user-specified interval, and error bar extents equal to a) the mean + the extreme values, b) the standard error in the Y values, or c) the standard deviation in the Y values.
   
• Added a Disable hide/unhide with middle mouse button option to the General Options screen for those users who tend to inadvertently click the mouse wheel.
   
• Made several improvements to the "Multiple Plots" dialog for printing multiple documents. Documents are now shown in a list box with more room for the document title than the previous collection of 32 checkboxes. Corrected an aspect ratio problem in the layout diagram that might have resulted in a fouled up picture for landscape orientation. Added a "Deselect All" button to compliment "Select All".
   
• Bug fix: 1D plots produced by the Excel Add-In and saved as a bitmap image might have been clipped oddly because of a failure to correctly handle the hidden note in the upper left corner added by the Add-In. This might also have occurred if you added your own hidden notes. If you had this problem, you likely saw too much white space at the top of the plot and the plot possibly being clipped at the bottom. All other plot types worked correctly.
   
• Bug fix: It was possible to clip the legend in 3D views of 3D or 4D data when saving to a high-resolution image.
   
• Bug fix: The Backbone Curve command on the Generate menu sometimes duplicated the first point and skipped the last point in the input.
   
• Bug fix: If you panned a plot with a calendar date scale by using the keyboard arrow keys, and you elected to have DPlot choose the tick mark interval, that interval tended to grow with every pan.
   
• Bug fix: DPlot crashed if on a 1D plot you had one or more non-positive values and opted for logarithmic scaling.
   
• Bug fix: Undo did not work after "unhiding" curves using the middle mouse button.
   

]]> http://www.dplot.com/revisions.htm#R2307

05 February 2011
Version 2.3.0.7

• Expanded on the last update's new feature of hiding a curve with the middle mouse button: If you press CTRL + middle mouse button while pointing to a curve, all curves except the one pointed to will be hidden.
   
• Fixed an annoyance with inserting Symbol characters in text strings. In previous versions the insertion point was placed before the newly-inserted Symbol character(s). In this release the insertion point follows the new characters.
   
• Bug fix: The Reorder Curves command did not mark a file as "dirty", prompting you to save before closing.
   
• Bug fix: DPlot crashed with an overflow error for Y values with amplitudes greater than about 1.34E+154. The error occurred in squaring the amplitude as part of finding the RMS value. (The maximum amplitude that DPlot can handle is the maximum amplitude of an 8-byte floating point number: 2^1024 or about 1.798E+308. In other cases DPlot gracefully balks at numbers exceeding that limit, and now does for RMS.)
   
• Bug fix: Since the inclusion of horizontal error bars, the text boxes for error values on the Error Bars dialog (fixed value, percentage, and custom) have not been updated properly when switching curves. This might have led to inadvertently changing an error value without actually changing anything.
   
• Bug fix: The Delete Points in Box command on the Edit menu failed to reset a flag indicating that X values were evenly-spaced, so that condition was never reevaluated. This worked fine until the graph was saved as a DPlot file. In that case, if the data was originally evenly-spaced DPlot would erroneously save only the start and end X values. Thanks to Robert Duran of Baker Engineering and Risk Consultants for help with the problem.
   
• Bug fix: The Average all Curves command might have given nonsense values for curves that did not have the same range in X.
   
• Bug fix: The Fill Between Curves option for Fill to bottom only for Y <= Yref failed if the last point in a curve was not greater than Yref
   

]]> http://www.dplot.com/revisions.htm#R2306

22 January 2011
Version 2.3.0.6

• When zooming with the mouse wheel, you may now restrict zooming to the X direction by pressing the CTRL key, or to the Y direction by pressing the SHIFT key.
   
• For XY plots you may now hide a curve by pointing to it and clicking the middle mouse button (mouse wheel on the majority of mice). If the middle mouse button is clicked when the mouse does not point to a curve, all curves are made visible.
   
• Modified "Make Step Plot" plugin (licensed version only) to include an option to center the steps on the input X values. Thanks to Dr. Ian Crawford for the suggestion.
   
• Improved performance of antialiasing. In all previous versions the antialiasing performed for line segments by DPlot was very inefficient with all or portions of line segments that were outside the plot limits (after zooming, for example).
   
• Made a change to the drawing order for XY plots when minor grid lines are used and the minor grid line color is different than the major grid line color: In previous versions the minor grid lines for the Y axis would overlay the major grid lines for the X axis. This was only noticeable when the minor grid lines used a different color than the major grid lines. In this version minor grid lines will not obscure major grid lines.
   
• Bug fix: If multiple Y axes were used, the title for the 2nd Y axis was placed far right enough that it was impossible to overlap any numbers (or dates, etc.) on the X axis. So for dates/times on X, for example, the 2nd Y axis title was positioned much farther to the right than it would be for the default number format. The intent was probably good at one time, but since this same check isn't performed for the primary Y axis it was, at best, overkill.
   
• Bug fix: If "Axes at 0" was checked and grid lines were used on the Y axis, the bottom of the plot would be drawn (actually overdrawn) with the grid line color. This was particularly noticeable if the axes line width was the same as or smaller than the grid line width and used a different color.
   

]]> http://www.dplot.com/revisions.htm#R2305

30 December 2010
Version 2.3.0.5

• Added options for image export. For GIF and PNG images, you can now specify that the plot background color should be transparent. (Whether the target application respects the transparency setting is outside DPlot's control. Google Earth, for one, does honor this setting.) For both GIF and PNG images, antialiasing is forced off and the standard Windows' font antialiasing is turned off. You may get better results saving to 32-bit PNG, particularly when importing images into Google Earth. Updated the SetPluginImageDims macro/DDE command to take account of this new capability.
   
  Note: Whether output is to an 8-bit GIF or 32-bit PNG, all antialiasing (including text) will be turned off. Depending on your needs and what is possible, you can produce a better-looking image by saving the background image, cropped to the appropriate extents, and importing that background image into DPlot rather than going the other way: saving a transparent image in DPlot and importing that image into some other application. In the former case, all DPlot graphics are drawn onto a background image that is already in place, so antialiasing is not an issue: if antialiasing is turned on or you use one of the Windows default antialiasing features for text, those lines/symbols/text will be drawn as expected, with the proper antialiasing. See, for example, the Background Images topic in the blog.
   
• Modified the behavior of tick marks on 2D views of 3D data. If both the X and Y axis number formats are set to "None" and a plot has no X,Y,Z Labels, then tick marks are not drawn.
   
• Bug fix: It was possible to cause DPlot to crash if you used the incorrect number of arguments to a text placeholder (e.g. $X) in an equation.
   

]]> http://www.dplot.com/revisions.htm#R2304

14 December 2010
Version 2.3.0.4

• Bug fix: The "Swap X,Y" command on the Edit menu was inadvertently omitted for 4D surface plots, and did not work for 4D scatter plots.
   
• Bug fix: If you dragged a corner of a 2D plot using the mouse to resize the graph and inverted either the width or height (e.g. dragged the left corner right past the right corner), DPlot would enter an endless loop attempting to draw the plot within a box with a negative dimension.
   
• Bug fix: Corrected a problem that might have caused a crash with 2D views of 3D data on a rectangular grid. If "Show coordinates in popup window when mouse hovers over data point" was checked, DPlot sometimes crashed when working with large data sets due to a division by 0 problem.
   

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13 November 2010
Version 2.3.0.2

• The $AREA text shortcut now works with 3D and 4D surface plots, reporting the plot's surface area. The resulting text will use the number formatting of the Z axis.
   
• Added the ability to draw the legend for 3D and 4D surface plots on various sides of the plot. Previous versions forced the location to the right side. Currently these options are only available via the right-click menu for the legend and are not supported for scatter plots. The ContourLegend command can be used to set the legend placement.
   
• Added an option for 3D views to display a graphic of the X,Y,Z coordinate axes in the lower left corner of the plot. Currently this option is only available via right-click menu (Orientation Key). NOTE: No effort is made to include this graphic in the clipped region of saved bitmap images or bitmaps/metafiles copied to the clipboard. In other words it might be there; it might not. And it might be cropped. This will likely change in a future release. Like the 3D legend options above, this option is only offered via right-click menu in a quasi-effort to hide it until all the kinks are worked out: it is possible that with this version and using both options that you'll end up with plot attributes overlapping.
   
• Added "Monthly Peak" plugin for the licensed version, which is handy for finding the monthly peak value within a time series (daily cumulative sales figures, for example).
   
• Bug fix: Probability scale with small or large probabilities (less than 0.0001% or greater than 99.9999%) might have resulted in an endless loop.
   

]]> http://www.dplot.com/revisions.htm#R2301

29 October 2010
Version 2.3.0.1

• Bug fix: Another one introduced with version 2.2.9.9 - calendar dates w/ times in text boxes were not interpreted correctly.
   

]]> http://www.dplot.com/revisions.htm#R2300

28 October 2010
Version 2.3.0.0

• Bug fix: Version 2.2.9.9 introduced a bug that broke the keyboard shortcuts for changing the view angles of a 3D plot.
   

]]> http://www.dplot.com/revisions.htm#R2299

26 October 2010
Version 2.2.9.9

• Added "Time of day (fractional days)" number format. The standard "Time of day (hours)" format assumes values are in hours (0=midnight, 1=1AM, etc.). "Time of day (fractional days)" takes input values in fractional days (0 again=midnight,0.125=3AM,0.5=noon, etc.). Other than the obvious (your input times are in fractional days), this is mostly beneficial when swapping data to/from Excel. (Excel always stores times as fractional days, which ended up causing unpredictable problems in many cases with DPlot.) The Add-In now uses the new "Time of day (fractional days)" format for time values. Please note: This new format will be used in lieu of "Time of day (hours)" when reading times from a text file, pasting data from clipboard text, or sending data to DPlot from Excel via the Add-In. Generally this will not be a problem. It may be a problem, though, if you typically modify the X axis values using Operate on X or similar operation, expecting the X axis values to be stored using whole number hours. You can easily check which format is used by right-clicking on any number along the X axis.
   
• Changed dataTaker file import plugin to display all error values (overrange, underrange, etc.) as symbols. Previous versions ignored those values. Also made a simple change to DPlot that erases curves with 0 points on return from a file import plugin, which might occur for any number of reasons. And a bug fix: Corrected a few problems in the dataTaker plugin module that might have resulted in crashes for odd files.
   
• Bug fix: If you opened a file and launched DPlot by double-clicking in Explorer and that file is handled by a file import plugin, DPlot might have attempted to use the last-used file import plugin rather than the appropriate one to process that file.
   
• Bug fix: Eliminated the bivariate interpolation method from the Generate Mesh command for 3D data because it was just too unstable, crashing DPlot in many circumstances. The quadratic interpolation method added with version 2.2.9.1 is completely stable, quite a bit faster, and produces comparable results.
   

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