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Legend, Notes, and Labels

 
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raydela



Joined: 10 Sep 2003
Posts: 46
Location: Oxford, MI, USA

PostPosted: Wed Sep 17, 2003 8:54 am    Post subject: Legend, Notes, and Labels Reply with quote

Hello Mr. Hyde,

I discovered a few more things while using Polar plots:

1.) Legend:
Symbols assigned to curve lines (Options | Symbols/Line Styles...) only appear on the lines in the Legend when it is positioned at certain places on the page.
I'm sending you an e-mail with an example plot that exhibits this behavior: Drag the Legend box around and you'll see what I mean.

2.) Legend and Notes:
Copy the plot into an Excel sheet (DPlot: Ctrl-C, Excel: Paste or Paste Special and choose windows meta file). The Legend and Notes are not positioned the same as what appears in the plot.
In my Polar plot example I e-mail to you, move the Legend somewhere outside, but near to the plot. What you paste into Excel will show the Legend touching or inside of the plot. Notes do the same thing.

3.) in "Text | Title/Axes...", I placed some text for the Y-Axis (radial axis scaling) of my Polar plot but it does not appear. For now, I am using a note and dragging it over there.


Ray
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DPlotAdmin
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Joined: 24 Jun 2003
Posts: 2310
Location: Vicksburg, Mississippi

PostPosted: Wed Sep 17, 2003 9:30 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Quote:
1.) Legend:
Symbols assigned to curve lines (Options | Symbols/Line Styles...) only appear on the lines in the Legend when it is positioned at certain places on the page.
I'm sending you an e-mail with an example plot that exhibits this behavior: Drag the Legend box around and you'll see what I mean.


Bah. This is a silly bug. If you imagine a box just big enough to enclose
the polar chart, symbols aren't drawn outside that box. This clipping is intentional, but inappropriate for the legend. Will fix this soon.

Quote:
2.) Legend and Notes:
Copy the plot into an Excel sheet (DPlot: Ctrl-C, Excel: Paste or Paste Special and choose windows meta file). The Legend and Notes are not positioned the same as what appears in the plot.
In my Polar plot example I e-mail to you, move the Legend somewhere outside, but near to the plot. What you paste into Excel will show the Legend touching or inside of the plot. Notes do the same thing.


First, you'll always want to pick "Picture (Enhanced Metafile)" rather than "Picture". Standard metafiles don't scale nearly as well as enhanced metafiles. Different Office versions have different defaults for which format they'll choose if you simply select "Paste", so until you're sure which is which you should always use Paste Special.

Next, you'll always want to use a plot size (Options>Extents/Tick Marks/Size) that won't require scaling down in the destination application. The file you sent used width and height of 7 inches. With normal margins and adding your note and legend, this won't fit on a page so Word will scale it down. While metafiles can be scaled, the operation is a bit problematic because the plot itself can be scaled to any factor, but fonts are only available in discreet sizes. So you can end up with, for example, text in the legend overlapping the frame that should be surrounding that text. This problem is much worse with standard metafiles than enhanced metafiles, but exists with both formats.

Having said all that, though, I don't see the problems you mention when doing a copy/paste to Excel 2000 - neither the legend nor the note are touching the plot. One thing I did notice is that the title lines are placed differently. Without looking too hard at this, I'm pretty sure the discrepancy is due to the titles being centered on the window for the display, but centered in the picture width for metafiles. I'll most likely change this to centered on the plot.

Quote:
3.) in "Text | Title/Axes...", I placed some text for the Y-Axis (radial axis scaling) of my Polar plot but it does not appear. For now, I am using a note and dragging it over there.


This omission was intentional. Every placement scheme I've tried ends up either looking fairly ugly, or it isn't clear what the label references. I'll gladly add this back in if you'll give me a good description of how you'd like this label to be placed - location, rotation, etc.
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DPlotAdmin
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Joined: 24 Jun 2003
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Location: Vicksburg, Mississippi

PostPosted: Wed Sep 17, 2003 11:19 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Quote:
In my Polar plot example I e-mail to you, move the Legend somewhere outside, but near to the plot. What you paste into Excel will show the Legend touching or inside of the plot. Notes do the same thing.


"Upon further review", there is a problem with the placement of the legend and/or notes if they are well outside the imaginery rectangle surrounding your plot. This has been fixed. I'm hoping to have a beta version up by the end of the week that will have this fix (as well as your polar plot suggestions) incorporated.
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jsc



Joined: 02 Dec 2005
Posts: 222

PostPosted: Fri Dec 02, 2005 9:09 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

David, Really nice looking program. Just happened to stumble across it on the xblite web site. I've been complaining for a long time that Excel is a pain to work with for data analysis and this looks like it will help. Thanks.

May or may not be a bug, but I just save a grf file in dPlotjr. When I tried to open it up in dPlot Viewer, the screen flashed, then abruptly closed without any error messages showing. I created another file from the same dataset - same problem. Then I created a very simple file, and it worked as intended.

To make a long story short, in the Excel column headings I had imbedded carriage returns ("alt-enter"=line feed in a cell) to break the text where I wanted it to break. When the grf file was saved, this resulted in multiple lines to the label, which must have screwed up your parsing. I removed the extra carriage returns in a text editor, and everything loaded as intended.

Don't know if you want to allow this functionality or not, but the lack of any error message had me going for a while. Now that I know, I can avoid it.

Again, thanks for a great program.

Jon
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DPlotAdmin
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PostPosted: Fri Dec 02, 2005 9:35 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Jon,
Thanks for all your comments and for pointing out the bug. I'll fix this for sure before the next release, replacing a carriage return, line feed, or carriage return/line feed pair with a \n sequence (which DPlot does understand) before writing the file. And of course prevent the crash you're getting with previously saved files.
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jsc



Joined: 02 Dec 2005
Posts: 222

PostPosted: Fri Dec 02, 2005 1:45 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

David,

Thanks much for the quick reply! I'm going to see if we can fork over a couple of licenses here - I've been looking for something like this for a while.

Jon
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DPlotAdmin
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PostPosted: Sat Dec 03, 2005 6:06 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

The line break problem is fixed in a minor update. Licensed users can get the update by selecting Help>Check for Updates.

Changes since 2.0.1.8:

Info>Interpolate now allows you to input a date value for X if one of the calendar date number formats is used for the X axis.

View>Reorder Curves now includes "curves" which serve only as the source of error amplitudes for error bars. In previous versions these curves were not included, which made it very hard to correctly associate colors with curves.

Added pressure unit selection to Data Processing dialog (psi, megapascals, and kilopascals). Previous versions were limited to psi.

Bug fix: The pan feature for zoomed XY plots erroneously panned the plot a small distance if you simply clicked within the plot. This version does not pan the plot unless you drag the mouse by 10 or more pixels before releasing.

Bug fix: Axis labels and legends with embedded carriage return/line feed sequences or line feeds only were handled improperly in DPlot. You might end up with these embedded characters if, for example, you use Alt+Enter in a column heading in Microsoft Excel to force a line break in a label. When saved to a DPlot file these embedded characters were preserved, which in some circumstances caused DPlot to crash when reading that saved file. In this release DPlot 1) prevents this crash with previously saved files, 2) when pasting data from the clipboard or handling data passed by DPLOTLIB.DLL (from the Excel Add-In, for example), replaces these characters with the literal characters \n, which DPlot recognizes as a line break, and 3) performs the same check before saving a file, for cases that might have been missed by #2.

Bug fix: If bitmap dimensions specified with Edit>Copy>Dimensions or any of the image export plugins was set to a very small non-zero value, then DPlot would waste a lot of time trying to find a combination of font sizes and plot size that would fit within the specified rectangle, taking minutes to produce a bitmap instead of the normal second or so. In this version if either the width or height values are less than 100 pixels, DPlot behaves as if those values were set to 0: the document window dimensions will be used.

Bug fix: Relatively new feature of being able to select multiple curves in the Symbol/Line Styles dialog had a bug that could under some circumstances cause DPlot to crash.

Color selections saved to a DPlot file were incorrectly assigned if the file was opened with File>Append (appended to an existing plot).

Added an option to outline solid filled symbols on XY plots in black. In previous versions all symbols on XY plots were drawn with a single color.

If you create a curve in an empty document using an equation (Y=f(X), etc.) and check "degrees", the polar plot "degrees" option is now automatically turned on (that is, input angular values are assumed to be in degrees rather than radians). Likewise if "radians" is checked when creating a curve, the "radians" polar option is turned on.
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jsc



Joined: 02 Dec 2005
Posts: 222

PostPosted: Wed Dec 07, 2005 9:27 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

David,
Regarding the \n for the labels and legends, I just imported another file with the multiline labels. No crash out of DPlot, but the representation of the label in the legend now shows the "\n" imbedded in the string, ie, there is no line feed, but there are the characters "\n" buried in the string.

I can easily edit the grf file to replace the \n's with a space, but I don't think that is what you planned on happening.

Thanks, Jon
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PostPosted: Wed Dec 07, 2005 11:25 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Thanks for the notice.
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