SharpPlot – Release 1.2b June 2006

Availability
Available from CUSP site from June 9th 2006.

New capabilities
Altitude shading with Contour plots and for response surfaces fitted to 3D Cloud charts.

Data can now be shaded with user-settable colors to generate ‘false color’ plots of temperature data, or to map any 3rd dimension as a given color scheme. The example illustrates the price of houses plotted as a landscape showing the relationship of price to age and floor area. The scalebar is also added as a style for the Bubblechart:

The circles representing the price may be scaled radially, as an alternative to the default scaling by area. Scale marks are drawn at the ZAxis tickmarks, which will be computed from the data, but may be set by the user.

Other updates in this build
Xlabels on Column chart – were slipped one label to the right. Also the labels should always centre-align in the case of an isometric chart. Fixed.

Column chart – scalar data (a simple line of towers) should make a shelf just deep enough for the bars, not a proper Y-axis. Fixed.

Indexed data – was rebasing the X-values to 100 as well as the y-values in an xy-plot. Fixed.

ScatterPlot – now accepts a category variable on the X-axis (so you can plot Yield vs Farm) for both integer and floating-point y-values. Moot point whether we need category data on the y-axis also here!

CloudChart – accepts category data on the x and y axes (but not the z-axis).

Label formatter – for historical reasons this signals wrapping with ‘XXXXXXXX;’ but it now tolerates formats like ‘xxxxxxxxx\n’ in addition (a newline embedded in the string simply embeds a newline in the output as before).

DrawMultiple – no longer does BoxPlot as a type. The new argument style for BoxPlot would really mess up the overloads required.

NewCell – was resetting the scale every cell in a cellular plot, giving some very interesting artwork in the Wise Eel’s Bridge example. Fixed.

KeyDefinition struct – now defaults FillStyle to Solid if omitted from the constructor.

Tracechart – notices XYPlot style now. Allows X-values as first element of array.

Autorange – with XAxis style ‘Date,Time’ we were dividing the specified Xrange by 24, so a range like 35414.5 35419 was ending up as dates around 1904. Fixed.

Horizontal bars – categorised data was not being labelled correctly when there were zero values in stacked barcharts. Fixed.

Aggregations – combining Grouping and Splitting to make a stacked bar from ‘database’ data was losing track of the missing values in the original dataset. The rule now is that an aggregate composed entirely of missing data is now flagged as ‘missing’ and its value tags etc will not be drawn.

Automatic datumlines – were generated more than once if you plotted more than one barchart on the same set of axes. Fixed.

Vertical value labels – did not respect ‘Middle’ style on barcharts. Fixed.

Curves style – a small error in the conversion of Polylines to Bezier curves could give odd ‘overshoot’ effects when successive segments differed greatly in length. Did not show up in timeseries plots, but could draw some very odd contour lines. Fixed.

DrawBubbleChart – now allows ‘Radial’ scaling, which may be more suitable for unfilled markers and notes existing Marker Scale so you can just make them ALL bigger in proportion.

Adds style ‘ScaleBar’ which draws a nominal Z-axis in the right margin with bubbles scaled at each Z-tickmark. These are labelled using the ZLabel formatter and drawn with the Key font.

Scatter plots – value tags note the actual marker size to offset the tag above the marker correctly with scaled markers.

Text insertion patterns like X~~X<b>XXXX</b> were failing on multiline labels. The pattern must be applied before the label is split at newlines. Fixed.

Spanned labels were merging duplicates on the innermost rank. Fixed.

Explicit tick placement failed for exactly 2 tick positions, as the values were confused with (major,minor) interval settings. Fixed.

XBarChart – was incorrectly forcing an extra final (as well as initial) tick on the X-axis. Fixed.

Keys – automatic keys (set without explicit keyframe) now wrap the text much more intelligently. Hopefully with this behaviour and KeyNudge for fine adjustments, we can forget KeyFrame unless the layout is very fussy about key placement.

Data in rows – enhanced slightly to allow a simple barchart to cycle through colours one per BAR rather than one per GROUP. The X-ticks are drawn with one tick (and X-label) at each bar, even though they would logically form a single group. Keys work groupwise as normal, and so each bar has a legend entry. Group gap is ignored, and ‘gap’ sets the inter-bar spacing in this case. Use DataStyle = DataStyles.Rows to set this behavior.

Angled captions – the PDF output was rounding the transform matrix too soon, and losing precision in the angle as a result. Fixed. Also the placement of angled multi-line captions on 3D charts was not as pretty as it should be – also fixed.

DrawTable – now accepts arrays of strings, allowing the caller to format the data before creating the table. Also, this was eliminating empty cells rather than just skipping past them, possibly mis-aligning the rest of the row. Fixed.

Experimental Chart Type
Comments and feedback welcome on this one – we have been asked for this chart type several times, and the design seems to cope well with most requirements. See the tutorial in the help file for more details.

DrawVectors – will plot a scatter of arrows (for current-flow charts) or any kind of directed graph involving nodes and connections. Takes the start and end-points of a set of vectors and draws them as independent lines with optional nodes or arrowheads. Value tags are written along the lines, centred above.