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vm_showpaper – was always forcing a 12pt margin above the chart. Now only does this if ShowPaper is set to 1 (the default).
Gradients – the way all the built-in gradients work is to ‘lighten up’ the base colour by stirring in some white to make the target colour for the highlight. If you want to grade to an arbitrary colour, you now have the syntax:
chDefineTile 77 '34+Fuchsia'
This will use the pattern numbered 34 (numeric pattern ids only here) but will grade towards ‘Fuchsia’. Of course hex values are also allowed here as a way of specifying arbitrary colours. An alternative is to override the amount of white stirred in. The default is to grade to a target of the base colour + pattern-3 so ...
chDefineTile 78 '36+1'
... will give a much more intense ‘spotlight’ than normal here. This may get extended in the future to allow you to adjust the focus-position of radial gradients and so on, but the differences in the way gradients are specified for SVG, PDF and VML makes this a little tricky.
Limit checks – charts with very big data values (e.g. a fixed y-range with a datapoint at -1.1E35) could cause various strange effects in SVG and VML and made an invalid PDF. This is now protected against by limiting the logical ‘paper size’ to about 36ft square which keeps the numbers to an acceptable size.
sv_wedge – applies ‘effects’ to pie wedges now. There is relatively little interesting to do here as we cannot realistically animate the position. Opacity and colour are about the only things worth playing with.
vm_wedge – picks up any ‘extras’ in the same way. This would be one way of making 3D pies (using the <v:extrusion ...> options) or adding dashed edges or anything else we haven’t thought of yet!