Ploticus version 2.30


Version 2.30


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.



data display engine  
Copyright Steve Grubb


Markup created by unroff 1.0,    August 26, 2004.