Features added during 2002-4

Some of the new features added to Release 5.0 of RainPro are:

• VLine plot now supports ‘values’ style. Value tags are written at both ends of the line, unless one end is all zero. Arrowheads are now omitted from the zero ends if the chart is one-sided.
• Axis ranging attempts a better default decision when you have a time-based axis and there is only one datapoint.
• Picture formatting now treats the chars ‘.,’ as ‘local decimal’ and ‘local thous’ characters which allows you to make a chart definition which can be shipped to a different locale and run correctly. It also allows a leading ‘(‘ to indicate that negatives should be parenthesised.
• Dial charts. Emulates a dashboard dial with one or more pointer(s) and one or more warning zones.
• New properties ‘XZ,YZ,IZ,ZA‘ to set up warning zones – these are supported by the normal XY plots (e.g. for control charts) as expected. You can set matching vectors of X and Y zones to make rectangular areas.
• New property NNudge which is in points, and allows you to place a note using chart co-ordinates (which baselines it at the xy given), and then nudge it an absolute distance.
• Multi-line value tags, split with ‘;’ as usual, on all charts which support data values.
• Any chart in a multi-page document can be bookmarked so that it generates an appropriate entry in the PDF outline tree. The bookmarks are also shown in the ‘Goto page’ dialogue of our own viewer.
• Notes now have a 4th argument giving the maximum width allowed. Text wider than this is wrapped into the width. Soft-hyphens are allowed as for NewLeaf (~ is the default character used).
• XBars and Gantt charts are now able to make bars of differing widths, so the Barwidth setting can be a vector (reshaped as required) rather than a scaler.
• Keys can be set to Autofit to ensure the entire legend always fits into the available space.
• Cloud charts now notice the Trend and Modelfit styles to draw fitted mesh surfaces with optional contour lines. This can also be used in a normal scatterplot if you have an array of numeric values to give the z-data.
• Labels/Value tags – text items are now formatted by the Picture setting in a similar way to numbers. This is a simple way to get multi-line X and Y labels.
• Missing Values – extended to allow a vector of values, any one of which will eliminate the matching point.
• Patterns – numbers 16-23 are now various opacities (these work in SVG and VML, but not PDF or our own viewer); 24-35 are linear gradients (which work in VML, SVG and PDF) and 36-39 are radials (same).
• Valuestyle ‘inside’ – now works on piecharts. This writes the values in the sector (at the approximate centre of gravity) rather than appending them to the end of the X-labels.
• Equation template – the allows you to format the result of a Model fit and have it nicely written alongside the fitted curve using various placement strategies.
• Table charts provide a convenient way of adding simple summaries and crosstabs to any other chart type.
• Axis captions and labels may be formatted separately for x,y,z if required.
• Simple 2 and 3-area Venn diagrams may be created.
• The numeric formatter now handles scientific notation (compatible with the C# ToString picture).
• The modelfit capability now handles weighted least-squares (thanks again to Dr Sykes)
• Overlayed gridlines for Tufte-style white grids

Please check the release notes for other bug-fixes and minor updates.