forums.silverfrost.com

[PaulLaidler]

A new set of DLLs is now available for download from here...

https://www.dropbox.com/s/0qw4u3uszhqif7g/newDLLs7.zip?dl=0

[DanRRight]

Thanks Paul. The simpleplot_update@ (though the name sounds irrelevant) now works. As I wrote the linear plotting looks almost ideal now, here how it looks in comparison with the leading scientific software OriginLab

Antialiasing makes curves look better then anything on the market now.
The only what needs fixing is numbering (Y scale has also problems, like number 1e22 instead of 100 or at least 1e2) and sometimes plotting gets out of plotting region (see the same below for LOG scales),
axis captions are better put centered by default -- and it is completely done

The source for this comparison is here. All may use own data or I can send mine for exact comparison (does this code work with you under last DLL7 ?)

[DanRRight]

continue

DLLs7 still crash my main code and SDBG64 in few circumstances so I still need to get back to older DLLs5. If this is not my problems and the users will also see the same crashing problems may be we will need to update the entire compiler. I may even give you to play my code so that the bugs will be found and fixed much faster not taking time of developers from more important things.

Now about LOG scale plotting. It looks now MUCH better, everyone can see that on this example I further modified from README file

[PaulLaidler]

Dan

What would you suggest that %pl does when calculating log10(y) and it finds that the supplied y is not positive? Maybe such values could be ignored (filtered out) but would that be helpful?

[DanRRight]

Paul,
I'd experiment with these options first. If do not set y_min=positiveVal then I'd leave things as they are now, i.e. switching on linear scale plotting. Same with y_min was set as negativeVal or zero. If y_min was set as positiveVal then I'd treat negative y point as tiny positive number say 1d-200. That might help the algorithm to do smoothing better than just ignoring the negative point.

Formally 1d-200 is not even needed to be that small. Visually it will be hard to distunguush two plots one with 1d-200 and another with some number smaller then minimum plotted value by just 4-5 orders of magnutude. That may help smoothing algorithm even more.

By the way among all smoothing algorithms I like in Originlab software so called B-spline as the most stable and kind of universal due to that. It works much more reasonable than Bezier or Spline and almost never makes artifacts. I do not know how it works though, it always was no time to investigate. Ideal in this case would be to have variable degree of smoothing from straight lines to spline at your wish. May be someone here can develop such single universal function, I always wanted to have that.

After all that it would be good to add to pop-up window which informs about switching from logarithmic to linear scale that ℅pl[ y_min=Val ] can prevent the switching

[PaulLaidler]

Thank you. I will see what can be done.

[DanRRight]

John,

Ideal axis numbering is not easy matter. I tried this and I know myself. You will swear like hell doing it. My own codes (not %pl based but the ones I made myself) numbering currently choses 5-7 numbers per axis and looks not bad.

Also in my own graphics programs when i use %pv and decrease plot size (if axis is too small for used large fonts) then number of tics decreases eventually to zero. Native %pl is doing something similar

Ideally with native %pl of course is to scale fonts size together with plot size, but hopefully this can be easily done in the future when all defects will be fixed. There are also some other small suggestions for corrections like longer tic marks in LOG scale, better name for "width" of plotted lines in CALL winop@("%pl[width=2]") which better call "linewidth" etc

Among them could be also your good suggestion to use arbitrary step (in Originlab it is called increment), say, 5 for X axis like in the plot above. But you know why I call the current state of native %pl close to ideal? The blind choice of computer looks as better option because increment 5 leaves only two numbers on X axis 15 and 20 - aesthetically this would not be good, though in some cases necessary. I hope in the future Paul will implement user definable increment in axis numbering and user's choice of first and last axis numbers (From and To), as well as drawing minor tic marks, horizontal and vertical grid lines (see pic below), background from external files, different axis numbering options like in this plot for example ( with the comma, I never used but some may like it)



the error bars, text labels and may be more symbols like here



or eventually at some point even color scale and surface plotting like here


etc. I've done many these myself in my own graphics routines, they are easy to implement (much easier then to make good numbering!) and they look great. But the automatic choice of computer with latest native %pl right now for X axis looks acceptable. And also have you noticed that with the recent additions the axis drawing and text quality already looks more professional then for example in the two last plots?

The Y axis numbering does not look good with default settings. But I see new options x_sigfigs and y_sigfigs for user defined adjustments. Can you try them and post here to see how things look (use for example Postimage)? Will setting y_sigfigs to 2 fix y axis? I can not do that right now because my computers loaded multiple FTN95 programs so I can not overwrite DLLs or change FTN95 dir - I can not use latest DLL7s for my other programs, have crashes, do you too?

When talk about graphics it is always better to show what you want instead of saying, so I post INSTRUCTION FOR POSTING IMAGES FOR ALL WHO ARE INTERESTED
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Use site Postimage.io where posting is easy as 2x2
- Chose "do not scale my image" (it is default now, so do not change it)
- Upload better png then jpg file by clicking on "Chose my image" and
- Highlight and Copy into clipboard using Ctrl+C second option Postiamage offers for posting in newsgroups called direct link.
- In FTN95 newsgroups place yourself this link between IMG and /IMG tags framed in the in square parentheses. Or look how forum offers to do that for you by clicking on IMG or URL buttons. Then press CTRL+V and click on IMG button again

[DanRRight]

[Kenneth_Smith]

I have used modified versions of these routines in my own plotting routines and found them good for selecting scales:-

https://people.sc.fsu.edu/~jburkardt/f77_src/toms463/toms463.html

Ken

[DanRRight]

Ken,
Good advice. Excluding probably first LOG example shown there it might be good option for universal scale for %pl

[DanRRight]

John, I may miss something with my blurry end of the week look: see the first LOG example with the absurd step distance 1.585? It should be XMINP=1 to XMAXP=200 with N=2 as usual

Also last one is also bad. It should plot tic axis marks from 0.1 to 2000 and numbering only large tic marks at exact decades 0.1, 1, 10, 100, 1000.

Middle example is kind of OK but N must be 3 not 2: 0.1, 1, 10

[Kenneth_Smith]

I have noticed that if the range of the y values to be plotted is less than 0.1 %pl plots nothing. Not a problem in itself as obviously one can rescale the signal and change the axis label accordingly but this does complicate the code immediately before the call to %pl. It would be better if %pl plotted something, even if the scales turned out to be a bit odd - simply a value/tick at the minimum and maximum values would be sufficient and much better than a blank window.

The following code illustrates the issue.

Ken

[PaulLaidler]

Ken

This limitation has now been removed for the next release.

[Kenneth_Smith]

Thanks Paul,

What's the timescales for the next release, days, weeks or months? I ask as I've hit this issue many times since I started using the new %pl. It's not really per-unit friendly - that's the way electrical engineers do network calculations which tends to produce small delta values, where for example a 2% voltage drop is plotted as a departure of -0.02 from the reference value of 1.00

[PaulLaidler]

I could upload a new set of DLLs tomorrow but that wouild be before I have fixed one or two things for Dan.