DPlot

[DPlotAdmin]

As with the previous beta release, licensed users who are not currently using version 1.8.2 of DPlot will need to download and install that version before installing any of these new beta releases. If you are a licensed user and are not signed up for the mailing list, contact me for the details on obtaining version 1.8.2.

General

• On the Point Labels dialog, the operation performed by the Ymax and Ymin buttons has been changed such that they will select the maximum or minimum values within the current window (after zooming, for example) rather than the absolute maximum/minimum values. Thanks to Edgar Poth for the suggestion.

Macro/DDE Commands

• Added ContourCustomColors and ContourColorScheme commands, which allow you to specify one of the two predefined color palettes or a custom color palette used to draw contour lines or shades.
  
• Added ContourLabelLines command to allow you to specify whether individual contour lines are labelled, the frequency of the labels, and whether the labels are transparent or opaque and drawn in black or the same color as the corresponding contour lines.
  
• Changed LineWidth command so that it may be also be used to set the width of the pen used to draw contour lines. Also added a new index value (-3) to specify the width of intermediate grid lines on XY plots (those drawn as a result of using Dense Grid Lines). In general, there should now be fewer head-scratching problems figuring out why grid lines aren't printed properly - the default grid line width is set to 0.01 inches for new plots (previously the default value was 1 pixel/1 printer dot).

DPLOTLIB DLL

• Added DPlot_GetEnhMetaFile, which retrieves an enhanced metafile of the specified size of an already existing plot. See btest4 (VB demo) and ctest4 (MSVC demo) in the DPLOTLIB and/or DPlot Jr distributions.
  
• Added a few additional error traps and now globally uses a timeout value of 20 seconds for all DPlot commands. Previous version didn't properly handle a few operations with complex plots (contour plots with a very large number of points, for example) on slower systems. Don't let the 20 second value scare you off... this is more than double the value I've needed on contour plots with 100,000 random points on an old Win95 system. Many thanks to Charlotte Meany for her help in isolating this problem.
  
• Minor point: LCC and Borland C examples haven't been keeping up with the last few changes. The distribution now includes batch files that will build all 4 of the C examples (assuming, of course, that you have those compilers).

Bug fixes

• Interpolation routine used by the Interpolate menu command incorrectly used linear interpolation on plots with a probability scale on the X axis. Thanks to Michael Duncan for pointing out the problem.
  
• In previous versions it was possible to save a DPlot file that contained a curve with 0 points. This would cause DPlot to crash when the file was re-read. This situation might have occurred as the result of a macro using the SelectCurve command for which the curve index was greater than the number of curves, after which no new points were added to the new curve. Thanks to Karin Heider for pointing out the problem.
  
• Numeric labels on the X axis with a probability scale tended to overlap each other, depending on font size, plot width, and axis extents. DPlot will now skip labels as needed to prevent labels from overlapping.

Downloads:
[Edit: Changed to normal download links, which now include all of the features mentioned above.]
DPlot: http://www.dplot.com/dplotsetup.exe
DPlot Jr: http://www.dplot.com/dplotjr_setup.exe
DPLOTLIB: http://www.dplot.com/lib/dplotlib.zip (DPLOTLIB is included with DPlot Jr; you don't need both)

Coming soon: PowerBasic programming examples thanks to Andrew Lindsay.

As always, comments, questions, and criticisms are welcome.
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