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[DanRRight]

Three and we are mostly done

1) The vertical and horizontal error bars i was talking about (they could also look like symbols) are these crosses. They are very often used and show the interval of the possible plotted values

Noticed nice font in this plot? Can anyone reproduce it?

I do not ask for the nice looking captions like in this plot which would be separate journey for the future updates. This could be not easy like 2x2 feature to implement.

2) Easy stuff: please allow larger range for the length of tic marks then 10 pixels. Good journals require very high resolution of the plots so we increase the pictures on 4k monitors almost to the end and 10 pixel long tics look too small. In LOG scale minor tic marks have to be 50-70% of the major tic marks

3) i am running out of further wishes

[Kenneth_Smith]

Paul,

It would be very much appreciated if you could make a new dll available.

Thanks Ken

[DanRRight]

As to the fonts, yes, there are 300+ fonts in the computer and none looks nice like this one. Or the one in Sample Linear above, that is totally godlike font (I might be wrong, though I tried most of them).

Tic length change already are done by Paul, but not the minor ones in LOG scale (I might be wrong again) and not longer then 10 pixels (needs to be 20 at least). And impression was that in LOG scale minor tic marks (those between decades, like 2,3,4... between 1 and 10) are not changing together with major ones marking decades (1, 10, 100 etc). That requires really minor changes of existing settings.

Minor tic mark implementation and sizes for linear scale is a different story, here you are right.

[PaulLaidler]

Here is a new set of DLLs. Don't forget to create a backup before installing.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/6vvct0hsnwmgcxl/newDLLs8.zip?dl=0

[Kenneth_Smith]

Thanks for your efforts Paul.

Regards

Ken

[Kenneth_Smith]

Passed my test with slightly made up numbers.

Thanks again.

[DanRRight]

OK, finally good news, as of today the options of new PL allowed it to beat not only Simpleplot but the Matlab and OriginLab in visual quality of image in linear plotting. Excusing couple small grains of salt here is what new %pl shows. Compare and tell which one is better, OriginLab or Silverfrost?



Now we can adjust all border sizes, the line widths and axis widths, positions of the titles and quality of smoothing. The x_min, x_max, y_min, y_max work in linear and LOG scale well. Specifically great is LOG handling of zero and negative numbers with convenient popup menu etc

So we are 99% close to be the best universal plotting routine in Fortran, congrats to Silverfrost

About LOG scale plotting will be next message as well as what is left to update and fix

[Kenneth_Smith]

Paul, I am reticent to post this as you are probably a bit fed up of our collective comments by now.
A useful possible addition would be a flag which forces %pl to place the scales external to the frame, this would avoid the situation where data points obscure the numbers on the scale, and would give a more uniform appearance when groups of plots a combined together. The group of plots shown in the example below would look so much better if this was possible.

[PaulLaidler]

OK. That might be a simple addition. Would it be for the x-axis only and what name would you suggest?

[Kenneth_Smith]

Paul, I would suggest both x-and y-axis, the magnetic flux density profile plot I posted on Tuesday suffers the same issue.

Maybe something like:-

[Kenneth_Smith]

John, your are correct there is an endless list of possibilities depending on the programmer's personal preferences for what "looks good" as well as the nature of the data itself. As soon as I had typed x_crosses = "automatic" / "xmin", the thought struck me why not include a numerical value - which would complicate the programming further. My own %gr based plotting routine which has evolved over the last 5 years now has 70+ optional arguments, and still there a other options which I would like to add for the odd occasion I might use them.

A typical call to this routine looks like this:-

[DanRRight]

Paul,

The few grains of salt in ideal %pl i mentioned above are the following. This is what's left to fix in Linear scale, all but may be one are really fast to fix

Let's take this code which plotted almost ideal plot above

[DanRRight]

CONTINUE 1

Respect to 2) and 3) above I played with the code Ken found on the net about scales
https://people.sc.fsu.edu/~jburkardt/f77_src/toms463/toms463.html
and found its first two routines SCALE1 and SCALE2 are useful. Let's look specifically for our case above. If we change data in the SCALE1 case (automatically decides which amount of numbers to place within users decided region) there to

[DanRRight]

CONTINUE 2
With LOG all fixable probably even faster

Let's take this code

[DanRRight]

CONTINUE 3

Here is another, may be better, or at least much more common option for numbering of major LOG tic marks. It looks more homogeneous and easier to implement. (The minor tics choice though does not look good, the %pl existing tics are better)



9) Again, X axis name "Wavelength" like in LINEAR case has to be centered by default. Right justified or moved somewhere has to be user's additional business if needed.

10) "Simpleplot_update" name has to be exterminated from the compiler ! This should be changed to Plot_update@(handle) which changes only the plot marked with specific handle or all open plots if handle is not set or negative

All that will make native %pl 99.9% ideal plotter.

The rest 0.1% can be added later. Some of these ~0.1% I implemented in my own graphics routines and I can share the experience and source code, often just few dozen lines of FTN95 Fortran. Mostly they are like 5 minutes to implement for programmers like Paul still they add WOW factor to the plot and leave all other real time graphics programs light years behind.

For example
- changing symbol size and color according to the Y or X value like in the plots few days back (the ones with the color bar)
- saving graphics into the PNG file PlotYYYYMMDD_hhmmss_ss.PNG and also clipboard
- adding mentioned before grid lines, color bar
- adding error bars (in the form of two numbers (a,b) which are for (+%,-%) from given Y point
- adding Settings menu
- adding move of everything with just Ctrl+mouse (i made that for all axis positions, it's very nice - all using this Fortran)
- adding boxes with the names for curves and symbols like in Crossection vs Deuteron Energy plot above posted few days back. Ability to use Greek letters, subscripts and superscripts
- adding graphics background (also easy to do in Fortran, see below)
- adding shadows to the lines, axis and tic marks
- making fill under the plot, like here



All that will still make 99.99% of ideal

AND the rest 0.01% would be adding an option of keeping all plotting proportions when the user scales the plot size by means of %pv