Ploticus version 2.30 |

Version 2.30
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Manual page for Ploticus_version_2.30(PL)
Ploticus version 2.30 - major noteworthy features
- Superscripts and subscripts capability. This is a limited implementation that
works with monospaced fonts such as the default GD fonts, default X11 fonts, or PostScript's /Courier.
In scripts, to ensure backward compatibility, this capability must be turned on using
proc settings enable_suscripts (or in your config file).
Prefabs have superscript/subscript capability turned on by default. More info.
Example.
- -drawdump and -drawdumpa command line options, which allow you to
overlay or combine results from separate pl runs
- this opens up new possibilties when using prefabs, among other things.
The drawdump file can be rendered later in any desired format, using this command:
pl -prefab draw dumpfile=filename
or by using proc drawcommands.
Drawdump capability is available in all builds.
- New proc processdata actions: join / leftjoin / rightjoin,
which perform a join operation (useful for example when doing a scatterplot and you want the X component to
come from certain records in the data set, and the Y component to come from other records); stats,
which examines a field in the current data set and reports the min, max, mean, SD, N (etc.). It does this
by setting ploticus variables, that can be displayed or used to position annotations.
- A new SVG mouseover/javascript scheme which gives better results and
produces SVGs that support mouseover independently (without involving the containing HTML file).
Thanks to Jamie Echlin.
More info. Requires 2 javascript files available here.
- Spaces and commas in data field names - Data field names cannot contain literal spaces or commas, but it is
now possible to encode spaces as _ and commas as |, for situations where the names will be displayed.
This capability must be turned on using proc settings encodenames or
in config file. Example.
Other new features and improvements
- Various prefab-related features
- autorange - new attributes mininit and maxinit - similar to lowfix
and highfix but are overridden by encountered data values that exceed them.
- proc pie - new attribute - labelfmtstring - a more flexible way of building labels
from data field(s).
- proc pie - improvement - labelmode: labelonly - label positioning improved
- proc curvefit - new attribute - clip - allows the generated curve to be clipped
to the plotting area
- proc curvefit - maxmimum number of points in the input data set is now dynamic; size is
controlled by new attribute maxinpoints
- EPS files - the latin1 encoding that was added a year or two ago is now optional.. this can be controlled using
proc settings ps_latin1_encoding attribute.. try this if you're having
problems with ploticus EPS files in other applications.
- proc annotate - new attribute clip, which allows annotation to not
influence the overall bounding box.. may be handy if far-out annotations are just as well ignored.
- color - new notation for specifying colors as hex values xrgb(xxxxxx) or xrgb(xxxxxxxxxxxx).
- new function - $boundingbox() - which allows bounding box tracking
to be turned on or off.. turn off if you want to draw something that shouldn't influence the overall bounding box.
- new function - $squelch_display() - squelching of all drawing activity
can be turned on or off.. turn off if you want to run plotting procs invisibly
- code cleanup to allow config files and proc settings to share
common code for processing the settings
- code cleanup for eliminating spurious color change requests, which apparently can improve performance rather significantly
in some cases. Thanks to Harshula Jayasuriya and colleagues.
- docs - direct cgi mode page overhauled; a new page for select attributes
Bug fixes
- proc bars - crossover is now cancelled when set to a value below axis min, or above axis max.
- functions $arith(), $arithl(), $isnumber() now handle numbers in scientific notation. Ditto for
conditional expressions.
- datetime w/ windowing - extra day was being shown, also a spurious warning message was being generated
- datetime w/ windowing - where last stub is AM, should be PM... a workaround is to use eg. laststub: 4PM
- in config file, option: content that requires quotes on the command line (eg. "rectangle= 1 1 4 4")
hadn't been parsed correctly. This is fixed, but quotes should not be used in config file.
- proc getdata now issues an implicit #proc processdata action: breakreset
- Some error messages had been going to the wrong place when -errfile was set on command line
- proc bars - when a crossover is used, one-way error bars need to go the opposite direction for the downward bars
- Noted - the #ifspec operator (used mainly when writing prefab scripts) requires care when intermingling with #clone.
- date arithmetic - a julian dates bug on leap years before 1970 has been fixed.
- proc annotate - clickmap box was way off with textdetails: align=right
- proc annotate - clickmap box (and bounding box) was not being influenced by textdetails: adjust=...
- SVG - the color gray(1) results in black in svg - should result in white.
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 data display engine
Copyright Steve Grubb
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