Updates to 5th July 2002

Availability
Please note that this release is currently available to CUSP subscribers only. The changes noted here will be incorporated into the standard edition of RainPro at the end of November 2002.

Latest updates
pdf.pshow – underlining did not scale correctly when following a scaling transformation (e.g. using leaf.Include). Fixed.

xxx.Flowbox – new macro function in all rendering tools to support round- cornered, shadowed boxes. This will be extended to handle wrapping text as soon as SVG implements this (V1.1 in about 6 months).

svg.mark,vml.mark – support ‘iconic’ markers (typically small transparent GIF files) as user-defined markers. The size defaults to 16x16, but would normally be given when the marker is defined, as in:

 ch.DefineMarker 16 'APLApple=24'

If only one number is given, the marker is assumed to be square.

svg.pT,svg.pL,svg.pM – extra flag to allow anti-aliasing to be selectively switched off for these elements. Dummied in PDF output and not yet used in VML, although it now could be in IE6.

svg.pB – adds ‘pointer-events=”visible” to all bars where there is an href set. This ensures we get the pointing hand even for unfilled bars. The Stepchart uses unfilled, unedged bars to get jumps to work where the style is ‘norisers’ so this is essential here.

svg,vml,pdf markers – markers for ‘missing values’ were being drawn at the chart origin in a zero-point font when character-based defined markers were used. Mostly this is harmless, but for some fonts the ‘fluff’ caused may become visible, and the output file is not as small as it could be. These are now always eliminated before any points are plotted.

svg,vml markers – defined markers with any decimal value are now OK, and are simply passed out in &#nnnn; format. This allows any Unicode char to be used as a marker. An alternative is to use the ‘ઢ’ style directly, but this will only work for SVG and VML output as it is simply passed straight through as the marker character.

svg.pshow,vshow,show3D – were not passing ‘effects’ through into the output stream, so (for example) shadowed text did not work on y-captions which were written vertically, or on angled x-labels. Fixed.

svg.javaprologue – always protects the script as CDATA just to be on the safe side! We can accidentally make ill-formed XML otherwise. If the script does not contain any ‘<’ characters it is taken as a filename and a link is made to it, rather than embedding the entire content.

svg.shade – was always setting ‘crisp’ edges. Now takes note of the setting appropriate to the chart type so filled polar charts have anti-aliased edges.

svg.circle,pT,stroke,mark – all make a small compensation for the apparent reduced line-weight when anti-aliased lines are used. This is particularly obvious in the grid-lines on polar charts which almost vanish when anti-aliased. The intention is that you see no change of weight when you set the SVG viewer to ‘higher quality’ off using the right-mouse menu.

svg.Bitmap,vml.Metafile – accept whatever we give them now, as IE can view most image types, including Bitmap and Metafile. PDF can only accept bitmap here, so error-traps and quits if the filetype cannot be processed.

svg.pTile – if the tile pattern is user-defined it fills and edges the tile as two separate operations. This allows you to make a mesh surface with semi-transparent tiles, but have the lines drawn normally.

svg.MakeTitle – picks up the chart title and creates a suitable description for the SVG <title> tag which (as of version 3) shows up in the browser titlebar.