SharpPlot: Recent Updates

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Recent Updates

Rendering improvements

The range of supported image formats has been greatly extended (see the .Net documentation on the Bitmap class) and the quality now matches the best of the Vector formats. Gradient fills, transparency and anti-aliasing are all fully supported. To go with the improved raster support, SharpPlot now offers the option to render to an image-map which allows raster charts to support hyperlinks, hints, tips and simple Javascript handlers in the same way as VML and SVG.

The ‘metafile’ format supported by .Net is also much improved, and allows charts rendered as metafile objects to be saved to disk and imported into Word or PowerPoint without loss of quality. An application can use the standard PictureBox control to display the final image, and make use of the PageMap class to enable mouse-tracking, drill-down and graphical manipulation of the data.

SilverLight support

RenderXaml and SaveXaml will export your chart in a form suitable for the SilverLight plugin. It is likely that the XAML support will be extended in future as the SilverLight plugin adds more capabilities.

Custom tickmarks

Detailed control over tick-mark length to allow complex time-series to define a hierarchy of time-periods (months, quarters etc). This goes along with the newly added ability to ‘span’ X-axis labels to make for a much more flexible labelling scheme.

Note that the major tickmarks have been set to 150% or 50% of standard, and the default XTickThreshold has had the effect of eliminating the gridlines at the smaller ticks.

data = new int[] {1,3,7,6,9,8,9,7,9,10,7,5};
xticks = new int[] {150,50,50};  // X-ticks relative to standard (repeated as needed)
xlabs = new string[]{"Jan\nFirst quarter","Feb\nFirst quarter", ... ,"Dec\nFinal quarter"};
sp.LabelLineSpacing = 140;

By combining the varied tick lengths with spanned labels, it is possible to represent any reasonable combination of time periods.

Wrapping text

Y-axis Labels and the Y-axis Caption (Atend style) now wrap automatically into the available margin width if no formatter is given.The only other auto-wraps are headings, subheads, footnotes and the ‘atend’ X-axis caption where the width is also known.

Formatters

Numeric and text pictures both now use the ~ to suppress the matching digit in the input. A handy use for this is to get months labelled as JFM...D by setting a date picture of MMM and a formatter ‘X~~’ to cut down to the first letter of the month.

Dates

The date formatter accepts newlines (dodges the limitation in the .Net ToString method) and also tolerates dates as vectors of 19530321 numbers as well as OLE dates. Many timeseries still use this style for the date column.

Duration formatting

X or Y style ‘Duration’ will trigger base-60 formatting. No assumptions are made about the units, except that base 60 is used for magnitudes and : as the separator. Use ValueTagStyles.Duration to have the same formatting applied to the value labels.

Angled value tags

You may tag data points with angled values, controlling the angle with ValueTagAngle property, which defaults to 34 deg.

Altitude shading

Response plots and contour plots now have the option of color-coded altitude shading to represent the Z-value. A scale bar may be added to both contour plots and bubble charts to help the user interprtet the height data.

Vector Fields and Directed Graphs

This is a new chart type which can be used to plot current flows, PERT charts, or any kind of directed graph. The short tutorial has several examples.

User-defined markers

The autumn 2007 release adds the ability to specify an arbitrary path (lines or filled regions) as a graphics marker. This would allow you to create a scatterplot with (for example) chemical symbols for the various types of compound being analysed.