Updates to 21st October 2002

vm_pT – IE6 has introduced a strange rendering bug with non-parallel tickmarks. This badly affects Dial charts and also can affect Polar charts. Worked around by drawing each tick as a separate Polyline element in this case. Also, we now selectively enable anti-aliasing for angled lines, sectors of pies and circles now, which makes these charts a lot smoother.

Gradients and opacity – See RainPro notes for full details.

Patterns 16-39 are now supported as an easy way to generate semi-transparent shadings and basic gradient fills compatibly across VML, SVG and PDF formats. This example simply sets pattern=36 on the chart frame and pattern=33 on the bars. The final appearance of the chart is as close as possible to looking the same under all 3 formats. See ...

They do look slightly different, but this is probably unavoidable given the very different approach each has to gradient definition. Here is the code that made them ....

 r„FillTest
© Simple barchart with some nice fills from canned selection
 chSet 'Tbar' 'Testing Some Gradients'
 chSet('box' '#3E306A,TL spot,0')('ax' 'White')('lf' 'arb,12,Yellow')
 chSet('style' 'forcezero')('patterns' 'Drum')('colours' 'Maroon,Green')
 chSet ('Key' 'First' 'Second')('kfont' 'arb,11,White')
 chBar 3 2½8 7 6 3
 PG„chClose ª r„'psView PG'

If you have a careful look at the PDF in Notepad, you will see why you really don’t want to do this stuff yourself!

Continue to: Changes up to 5th July 2002