Updates to 2nd April 2004

PDF output – best to dodge all translation issues by translating all hi-bit characters to octal (e.g. bullet is \225) so the PDF is fully 7-bit ASCII.

Character markers in SVG – markers like ‘bullet’ must be output as the correct Unicode value in SVG, not as • which works in VML. Fixed.

Image markers in SVG – these were assumed to be GIF images, so were sized assuming pixels, and not scaled with markerscale. SVG images are fine here, so these are scaled, and the given size is assumed to be points.

Inline markers in SVG – symbols defined with chInclude may be referred to by #id in the marker definition and will be placed and scaled in the same way as external image files. The marker height and width default to the viewBox of the symbol, but may be given to set the ‘base’ size of the marker, which will be used in the chart key and for unscaled markers in the chart.

 chInclude ‘duck © symbol id="duck" viewBox="0 0 3200 2400"
 chDefineMarker 148 '#duck=32,24'

The aspect ratio will be preserved under scaling, but you should try to keep it the same in both places to avoid clipping.

Basic HTML markup – support for <u>underline</u> added to SVG output. Markup for bold, italic, underline and href is now a pass-through in VML output and is eliminated from PDF output for the moment. One day, we may action these in PDF and generate correctly bolded text and hyperlinks. In SVG these almost pass through, but the tag needs to be made into tspan everywhere.

Tiled fills – work correctly in VML now with bmp or png or gif patterns.

SVG and VML – ugly code to relocate hints, tips etc to the front of the input script removed, as these are now separately buffered and always put down i the right place by chClose. Should speed things up a bit for big charts as it saves re-arranging a large text object.

Hyperlinks from chart frame were becoming a pain, and were badly implemented. Removed, and will be done right next time they are wanted!

Hyperlinks and JavaScript values were not being output with inline SVG markers. Now works correctly.

JavaScript fragments on categorised charts were being replicated by the number of categories! It worked fine, but made the file stupidly large. Fixed.

Flowbox – shadows done rather better using opacity, as the newer IE versions draw these very nicely in VML now. SVG also updated to match. This also applies to the optional drop-shadow behind the entire chart.

Continue to: Updates to 14th October 2003