April 2nd, 2012· Added a "Hide" option for individual reference lines.
· For licensed users only, added a file import plugin for Pacific Instruments BEU files.
· "List Peaks in Range" now works with 2D views of 3D and 4D surface plots, in addition to XY plots.
· Modified the Polynomial Curve Fit and Histogram menu commands to ignore points with Y values outside the limits set with Amplitude Limits.
· Applied the same Amplitude Limits change to all Generate menu plugins that produce new data in the same plot (as opposed to replacing existing data or creating a new document). (For plugin authors, you must use version 4 of the plugin interface to take advantage of this change. Contact us if you have any questions about this.)
· For Generate menu plugins that produce a new document, all points are preserved but the Amplitude Limits settings, if any, are now applied to the new document. Note that depending on what the plugin does, the new data may still be influenced by Y values outside the limits. If that is a problem, crop those values with the Crop or Clip Y commands on the Edit menu before using the plugin.
· Added a DeleteNote macro/DDE command to delete notes previously added with the various TextNote commands or the Add/Edit Note menu command.
· Most 3D/4D settings are now preserved when creating a new surface plot using Generate Mesh.
· Removed inapplicable right-click menu items for bar charts (line style, symbol style and size)
· Bug fix: DPlot did not properly save text notes with embedded \n sequences (new line) that were added with NoteText, TextNote, TextNote3D, or TextNoteEx commands to DPlot files. When re-reading such a file DPlot would lose track of the end of the note and usually complain about an unsupported keyword.
· Bug fix: Tab alignment in text notes did not work properly in lines containing control codes (subscripts, underline, etc.)
· Bug fix: Legend entries generated by DPlot commands (rather than those typed by the user) might not have been saved properly to comma- or tab-separated value files, perhaps leaving off a trailing quotation mark. This made then opening the files in Excel problematic.
· Bug fix: Curve labels might have been cropped in images copied to the Clipboard or saved as image files with "Crop white space" checked.
August 8th, 2011· Bug fix: The "fix" for Time of day (fractional days) number format in 2.3.1.7 unfortunately broke all other formats on the Extents/Intervals/Size dialog.
July 15th, 2011· Bug fix: The "List Peaks within a Range" command contained a bug that might have caused DPlot to crash since the inclusion of the median calculation.
· Bug fix: Bar charts with the bar width 1 pixel wide (which might happen if you have more bars than pixels in your screen resolution) were not drawn for filled bars unless the bars were outlined.
· Modified LineType command so that it does not complain if the curve index is less than or equal to 100. In previous versions the LineType command complained if the curve index was greater than the currently-allocated number of curves.
July 4th, 2011· Bug fix: For 2D contour plots of random 3D data, if you unchecked "Label every major line" then an uninitialized data problem might have caused a crash.
· Bug fix: If multiple XY curves existed and you deleted any curves other than the last, DPlot might have fouled up curve associations, e.g. a point label previously associated with curve 5 might now be associated with curve 4.
· Bug fix: With a negative tick mark interval (decreasing values from left-to-right or bottom-to-top) DPlot might have displayed 0 as some very small number, e.g. 2.2546E-16.
May 31st, 2011· Modified Average All Curves and Median of All Curves commands to only operate on visible (as opposed to hidden) curves.
· Added the complementary error function ERFC to the functions available with Y=f(X) and similar commands. The complementary error function is defined as erfc(x)=1 - erf(x).
· The List Peaks command now includes median, skewness, and kurtosis values (for Y in XY plots, Z in 3D plots, amplitude in 4D plots). Median, skewness, and kurtosis are also output for "List Peaks Within a Range" on XY plots. Also for the latter command, added a bit of slop so that plot extents would be included in the desired extents. In previous versions in most cases the low or high extents would not be exactly equal to the corresponding plot extents, due to roundoff error in converting mouse coordinates to plot coordinates.
· For file type D (multiple column text files, XY data) added a Heading rows have prefix entry to the Open dialog box. This allows you to specify a prefix character string that tells DPlot that any line including this prefix is definitely not data. In previous versions it was possible to confuse DPlot about where the data started if the heading contained information that could be confused as columns of numbers.
· For 4D surface and scatter plots, you may now specify a label for the 4th dimension. If used, this label will be drawn at the top of the legend using the legend font. Added corresponding AAxisLabel macro/DDE command.
· Added "4D Surface" and "4D Scatter" commands to the Excel Add-In.
· Added Poincare Plot optional plugin for the licensed version.
· Bug fix: When pasting 4D data, DPlot erroneously used the 4th column heading as the Z axis label.
· Bug fix: Under some circumstances the legend in 3D/4D plots might have been cropped when copying to the Clipboard, and the same problem might have left out or inappropriately cropped the date in the upper right corner and/or the filename in the lower right corner.
· Bug fix: If you used a second X axis at the top of a plot (via the Multiple Axes command) and set the number format for the lower X axis to "None", the upper X axis values might have overlapped any title lines.
· Bug fix: In some cases date/time groups on the Specify Columns to Plot dialog were not drawn, appearing as blank columns.
· Bug fix: In previous versions for 4D data the "Always auto-adjust scale factors for 3D plots" in many cases used the extents of the amplitude (4th dimension) rather than Z to find appropriate scale factors. This might have resulted in exceptionally tall & skinny or short & wide plots.
April 11th, 2011· Bug fix: If Print Caption on the Text menu for 1D plots was checked, plots copied to the clipboard might have had the filename overlapping the labels on the horizontal axis.
· Bug fix: If you dragged-and-dropped a text file with multiple columns of numbers onto DPlot and Pick Columns to Plot was not the default setting, DPlot saw the first column as Y values with X starting at 0 and incremented by 1, rather than the more usual X in the first column.
March 7th, 2011· Line breaks are now supported for point labels.
· Added Rank plugin to the Generate menu. This feature is roughly equivalent to Excel's PERCENTRANK function.
· Added Average Curve with Error Bars plugin to the Generate menu. This plugin produces a new document with Y equal to the mean of all Y values at any X within a user-specified interval, and error bar extents equal to a) the mean + the extreme values, b) the standard error in the Y values, or c) the standard deviation in the Y values.
· Added a Disable hide/unhide with middle mouse button option to the General Options screen for those users who tend to inadvertently click the mouse wheel.
· Made several improvements to the "Multiple Plots" dialog for printing multiple documents. Documents are now shown in a list box with more room for the document title than the previous collection of 32 checkboxes. Corrected an aspect ratio problem in the layout diagram that might have resulted in a fouled up picture for landscape orientation. Added a "Deselect All" button to compliment "Select All".
· Bug fix: 1D plots produced by the Excel Add-In and saved as a bitmap image might have been clipped oddly because of a failure to correctly handle the hidden note in the upper left corner added by the Add-In. This might also have occurred if you added your own hidden notes. If you had this problem, you likely saw too much white space at the top of the plot and the plot possibly being clipped at the bottom. All other plot types worked correctly.
· Bug fix: It was possible to clip the legend in 3D views of 3D or 4D data when saving to a high-resolution image.
· Bug fix: The Backbone Curve command on the Generate menu sometimes duplicated the first point and skipped the last point in the input.
· Bug fix: If you panned a plot with a calendar date scale by using the keyboard arrow keys, and you elected to have DPlot choose the tick mark interval, that interval tended to grow with every pan.
· Bug fix: DPlot crashed if on a 1D plot you had one or more non-positive values and opted for logarithmic scaling.
· Bug fix: Undo did not work after "unhiding" curves using the middle mouse button.
February 7th, 2011· Expanded on the last update's new feature of hiding a curve with the middle mouse button: If you press CTRL + middle mouse button while pointing to a curve, all curves except the one pointed to will be hidden.
· Fixed an annoyance with inserting Symbol characters in text strings. In previous versions the insertion point was placed before the newly-inserted Symbol character(s). In this release the insertion point follows the new characters.
· Bug fix: The Reorder Curves command did not mark a file as "dirty", prompting you to save before closing.
· Bug fix: DPlot crashed with an overflow error for Y values with amplitudes greater than about 1.34E+154. The error occurred in squaring the amplitude as part of finding the RMS value. (The maximum amplitude that DPlot can handle is the maximum amplitude of an 8-byte floating point number: 2^1024 or about 1.798E+308. In other cases DPlot gracefully balks at numbers exceeding that limit, and now does for RMS.)
· Bug fix: Since the inclusion of horizontal error bars, the text boxes for error values on the Error Bars dialog (fixed value, percentage, and custom) have not been updated properly when switching curves. This might have led to inadvertently changing an error value without actually changing anything.
· Bug fix: The Delete Points in Box command on the Edit menu failed to reset a flag indicating that X values were evenly-spaced, so that condition was never reevaluated. This worked fine until the graph was saved as a DPlot file. In that case, if the data was originally evenly-spaced DPlot would erroneously save only the start and end X values. Thanks to Robert Duran of Baker Engineering and Risk Consultants for help with the problem.
· Bug fix: The Average all Curves command might have given nonsense values for curves that did not have the same range in X.
· Bug fix: The Fill Between Curves option for Fill to bottom only for Y
February 1st, 2010· Removed all dependencies on DPLOTLIB.DLL functions from the Excel Add-In: all communication with DPlot is now handled entirely within the Add-In's VBA modules. This should result in fewer Excel security-related errors, and may mean that the Add-In will work with the upcoming 64-bit version of Excel 2010... stay tuned.
· For the Excel Add-In functions, added a hidden text notation with a description of the source data in the form "Source: [Filename]Sheet!R1C1". This might be useful for recalling the source of the data in a saved DPlot file. The note is initially placed at the upper left corner of the box surrounding a plot. No other consideration is given to the note placement, so if unhidden it might overlap other text entries (or other similar hidden notes). If you want to see this note (or move it to another location or delete it), click the Note button on the toolbar.
· Added $NC text shortcut, which is replaced by the 1-based curve index. This shortcut is only useful in the legend and in the Operate on X and Operate on Y commands on the Edit menu.
· Added the ability to specify a range in X to operate on with the Remove Random Spike menu command.
· Bug fix: Corrected a couple of problems with the SRTM file import plugin. 1) If "Set X:Y scale factors to give proportional ground distances" was checked (and this should have been labeled X:Y:Z scale factors) then the Z scale factor was not properly calculated, normally resulting in a greatly exaggerated Z scale in 3D views, and 2) The default tick mark interval was fouled up if the extents were greater than 20 minutes and less than or equal to 30 minutes.
· Bug fix: Point labels were misaligned roughly 1/2 character to the left in enhanced metafiles.
· Bug fix: The Integrate macro/DDE command effectively ignored any previous SelectCurve command; the curve that was integrated may (or may not) have been that specified with SelectCurve if more than 1 curve was present.
December 6th, 2009· You can now abort a Crop, Delete Points in Box, or Set Limits to Min/Max in Box command by pressing the Escape key before releasing the mouse button.
The macro Shell command now correctly handles command parameters that include quotation marks (which might be needed for commands containing spaces). For example, in the following command the additional quotes are necessary because of the spaces in the filename plus the commandline parameter:
· Shell(""c:Program FilesMy Application est.bat" param1",1)
· but would have resulted in the command being interpreted as a 0-length string in previous versions because of the successive quotes.
· Most dialog boxes that expect numeric input will now accept equations (prefaced by an equals sign). These equations may include text placeholders. For example on the Reference Lines dialog if you select Y= and "=$MEAN(1)" for the At Value entry, you will get a horizontal reference line at the mean Y value for the 1st curve.
· The principal difference between these text boxes and text boxes that accept character strings (titles, labels, etc.) is that the equation is evaluated immediately and is not preserved.
· Added an option to the Fill Between Curves command on the Options menu to fill the area below a curve, only for those points less than or equal to some reference Y value.
· The $YMIN, $YMAX, $ZMIN, and $ZMAX text placeholders may now include a range within which the min/max should be evaluated. For example $YMIN(2,1.6,2.4) is replaced by the minimum Y value of the 2nd curve between 1.6 < X < 2.4.
· The RefLine macro/DDE command now accepts equations for all parameters. This is primarily useful for specifying the value, e.g.
· RefLine(1,1,0x00FF0000,30,=$YMAX(3),"Max value, curve 3")
Added code to correctly handle printing to PDF print drivers when the filename is specified using the FilePrint command. (Before this release, some print drivers produced a PostScript file in this case, others insisted on displaying the Save As dialog.) DPlot now includes code to produce the expected results when using the Adobe PDF, PDF995, docuPrinter, or PDFcamp drivers. (The Adobe PDF driver is distributed with Adobe Acrobat; the others are available from:
· PDF995 from Software995.
· docuPrinter LT from Neevia Technology.
· PDFcamp from veryPDF.
· This change is mostly useful when batch-converting a large number of files when you do not want to continuously respond to the normal Save As dialog.
· Please note: No precautions have been added for other PDF print drivers. Results with drivers not mentioned here will vary. If you have a pet PDF print driver that misbehaves with the FilePrint command and a specified filename (produces a PostScript file or insists on displaying the Save As dialog), let us know and it is possible we'll add code to work around this problem.
· Added Request macro function to retrieve a dozen or so document-specific items from DPlot. The result of the Request function can then be used in subsequent macro commands. For example, you can request "ListPeaks" and then use that output as the text of a notation with the TextNote, TextNote3D or TextNoteEx commands.
· Added several request items related to filenames that you can retrieve from DPlot using a DPlot_Request call using DPLOTLIB.DLL or the new Request macro command: filename, filetitle, fname, and path.
· Bug fix: Ouch! The mean (and therefore the standard deviation report as well) shown by the List Peaks command was incorrect if a curve did not start at Y=0.
· Bug fix: If the legend for a 2D bar chart was dragged outside the plot extents, the color blocks used in the legend were clipped.
· Bug fix: In 2D views of random 3D points with contour lines, if a triangle edge had two points exactly equal to the contour value, no line was drawn.
April 30th, 2009· Made one simple change that makes version 2.2.4.2's keyboard shortcuts for changing view angles on 3D views much more useful: In this release the document window background is not erased when updating the plot. Instead the previous view is retained until the new plot has been calculated/drawn to a bitmap, and that bitmap is then BLT'ed to the screen. So you can spin a 3D view around without a lot of annoying screen-flashing. For bar charts, scatter plots, wireframes and waterfall plots, if antialiasing is turned off you'll now get a smooth animation using the arrow keys. (Surface plots are a bit sluggish because DPlot draws every individual pixel.)
· Another change related to the view angle keyboard shortcuts: when making a series of changes using those keys, only the first keypress results in an Undo file being saved. So if, for example, you spin a plot through 50 degrees with 50 CTRL+←'s then click the Undo button once, the view angles will be restored to the values that existed before those 50 operations.
· Added ContourViewChange command, which changes the viewing azimuth and/or elevation angles for 3D views by the specified values in degrees.
· A change in behavior for 3D bar charts: If "Borders" on the Contour Options dialog is unchecked, then bars will not be outlined in black. This change was made primarily for viewing bar charts at an elevation angle of 90 degrees (top-down) where the black lines might have overwhelmed the plot for more than a thousand or so data points.
· DPlot does a much better job with saving high resolution images, particularly with plots for which the legend or a text note has been moved well outside the extents of the plot. If you elected to crop whitespace in the image, those text entries might have been cropped or left completely out of the image. In at least some cases attempting to save a high resolution image with text objects well to the left or above the plot might have resulted in a crash.
· Improved placement of axis labels and numbers on 3D views. In previous versions the labels sometimes overlapped the numbers along the axes, and/or the numbers overlapped the corresponding axis.
· Bug fix: When using "Symbol sizes in Z units" for 3D scatter plots, DPlot erroneously applied the Z scale factor to the symbol sizes twice. For very small scale factors this error might have caused an integer overflow and subsequent crash.
· Bug fix: In many cases DPlot did not interpret column headings for 3D/4D data files correctly.
February 19th, 2008· Bug fix: An obscure problem was introduced in version 2.1.5.6 that resulted in strange problems (toolbar bitmaps disappearing, all lines being drawn with a single-pixel black line, and other assorted weirdness) after saving several thousand bitmap images. Thanks to Sven Henze for the assist in tracking this down.
February 15th, 2008· Changed the behavior of the image export plugins (BMP, GIF, TIF, etc.) to make better use of the resolution setting. In past versions this setting was only used to set the resolution field in the image header for formats that supported it (TIF in particular) and otherwise had no effect on the contents of the image. The result was that in most cases the images saved with the plugins were essentially screenshots. In this version if the resolution entry is non-zero then font sizes, line weights, and plot dimensions will be scaled up by resolution/(screen resolution). So if, for example, you have specified the plot size using the Extents/Intervals/Size menu command, then the box around the plot will be (size in inches) * resolution pixels. This change may require you to pay a bit more attention to the image width and size entries. If you use 0 for either the width or height of the image and do not specify the plot size with Extents/Intervals/Size, then the output image will be the document window size times resolution/(screen resolution). For a maximized document window this might easily result in an Insufficient memory error when attempting to create the image. For best results with a non-zero resolution, always check the Specify size option under Extents/Intervals/Size.
· Added /sp command line switch for preference files. If /sp is used, the specified preference file will be processed for all new documents during the current session, much as %APPDATA%DPlotPreferencesdefault.set is used in all previous versions. The /s command line switch continues to work as in all previous versions: the preferences file will only be used with files specified on the command line.
· Bug fix: In the last several versions of DPlot if you entered a non-positive value for an extent with a logarithmic scale using the Extents/Intervals/Size menu command, DPlot would present the appropriate error message, but then crash.
· Bug fix: DPlot considered the size and position of text notes when finding the extents of metafiles, whether the text note was hidden or not. This might have resulted in unnecessary white space if a note was placed outside the extents of a graph and then hidden.
· Bug fix: On an XY plot with only 1 curve whose X values were not monotonically increasing, the Smooth command proceeded as if everything was in order but produced no new curve (nor any error message). In this version the Smooth command will present an error message and suggest using the Sort command on the Edit menu.
· Bug fix: For 3D views of 3D or 4D data, setting the line widths of the major or minor axis lines to a negative number should have resulted in those lines not being drawn. And it does, unless Antialias objects on display output is checked (General command on the Options menu). In this update those lines will not be drawn, regardless of whether antialiasing is used or not.
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