visualdatatools.com

[SimonS]

Hi,
I have just been trying out the demo of datagraph and have found it to be very good. I was about to buy it when I realised that the font on the graph axis title had not changed in response to my changes from the menu. In other words I want to show a superscripted -1 within the Y axis title. Is this possible to do? Also can one change the orientation of the text in text boxes that I add to the graph?
Thanks very much.
Regards,
Simon.

[Mike]

[Mike]

[David]

The Label command does allow you to specify the rotation. By default it has an arrow, but you can either hide the arrow or tell DG to put the label at the starting point.

I didn't add a rotation option to the Text command since I didn't have a clear sense how to rotate things when you offset a text block from one of the corners. That is, if you specify an offset of 100,200 and a rotation of 30 degrees, what should the box be rotated around? Then add the complication that you can align the lines along a period, left right etc and I feel that the rotation point will feel arbitrary.

The Label and Text command have a lot of overlap.

And regarding changing the font style in the label.
This is really a bug in Cocoa. For example, go the the Mail application, select a text in the From/To field and change the font size/style. Now try to do the same thing in the Subject line. The issue is that Apple should have stopped the font style settings for the Token field just like they do for the standard field. Because they handle this internally I can't easily intercept the font style changes, and if I did it could break in the future. What I planned at one point to do is to catch these changes and either tell you what to do with a pop-up window or add the necessary layout commands. Instead what I did was to add it to the + menu. So type in a-1, select the "-1" and select Formatting->Subscript from the + menu. This inserts the proper curly braces and _. The size of the subscript is reduced and will not throw off line spacing (like it typically does in Word processors).

David

David

[Mike]

[David]

Maybe I should change the default settings. Send me files with the improvement. I tweak things from time to time. I tend to go for tight fits, but avoid overlaps. If it is clear that I can't suit 95% of cases with the default rules I could add controls to the standard axis settings. But by all means people should not assume that they can't affect the default rules. That might be the case for big software tools but I want the user community to feel that if there is an annoyance that it can be fixed.

I might not agree with all the suggestions, and I might have to digest things a little bit (such as rotation, multiple graphs etc) but you should absolutely make the case.

David

[Mike]

Hi David,
Thanks for being so accommodating. As you know, though, I'm pretty fussy so I don't know if what I find right will suit anyone else out there, so would rather not argue for the defaults to change. Also I've found that if I open a very old graph, things clearly move and shift about a bit, which I assume is the cumulative effects of some of the dealt settings changing over time, so I'd be reluctant to ask for changes on something which would affect very many people's existing files.

But in terms of an example, if I open a new empty file, and enter "Hello" as the x title, and "Hello" as the y xis title, there is clearly a lot more space between the y axis title and the axis.

I can see why you do that, because the numbers of each axis are horizontal and should take more space on the y-axis. But the allowance might be a little generous. e.g. enter 1,2 into each of the x and y data columns so that a line gets drawn and axis numbering appears, with one decimal place on each axis. The spacing between the y label and the numbers still seems a little wide to me, or, conversely, it might be too narrow on the x axis.

[David]

In the Axis settings you can set the space for the X and Y titles. It is right now vague as in "Narrow", "Medium",... The standard is good enough to accept up to about 2-3 digits or so. If you only have one digit then Narrow is better. In fact I recently tweaked the "Narrow" to make it smaller, from 2.4*font size to 2.0*font size. I might want to tie it to a different aspect of the font, since some fonts are slightly wider and some fonts have a slightly strange font size. Alignments are done based on the font metrics of the font, and there are a number of height metrics. Since fonts have different widths, there isn't really a font metric for a typical width. So 2.0*font size is something that looks good for Helvetica, Gill Sans and other fonts that I've tried, but it certainly might not work well for some fonts. And i want to know about those, with screen shots and files.

I don't want to adjust the spacing based on the actual data. That would make aligning different graphs a lot harder and I don't want things to jitter when you change the data continuously.

So be fussy. Try me. I bet that I'm fussier than you (yes, that is a challenge . I might have overlooked something, for example some combination of font type, font size, tick mark alignments, line widths, ... At some point I will make a call and say that it is unlikely enough that you should use the Text command, but I definitely want to tweak the heuristics. And hopefully the change is minimal enough that people would either not notice or accept it. But that rarely happens. Most of the time if I make a change DG automatically updates things when you open the file.

David

[SimonS]

Hi fellas,
Thanks very much for the great help. I won't pretend I understood all that you said, but I got enough to solve my problems!
I think I am getting the gist of the programme now. One thing I can't seem to manage however, is to put a space between groups of bars on the chart. I am trying to show how several recurring variables change at different points in time. I would like to have different times set for the x axis category i.e. day 1, day 2 etc. and have a space between them when displayed on the chart. Currently all my bars are sitting next to one another and the whole thing sort of blends together. How can I do this?
Thanks again for all the help.
Simon

[Mike]

[Mike]

[SimonS]

Yes Mike, that's exactly what I am trying to do. I just can't for the life of me work out how it's done!

[Mike]

[David]

[SimonS]

Thanks for that David, that has done the trick. I think I must have played with all the buttons except that one!
I am really impressed with the programme and the support from you guys. I have just registered my copy and I am looking forward to using it more.