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DPlot Viewer Changelog

What's new in DPlot Viewer 2.3.5.7

Sep 13, 2018
  • Bug fix: Gave up on trying to verify DPlot's own digital signature with new, more secure sha256 algorithm. Attempting to verify the signature under both Windows Vista and Windows XP resulted in errors that erroneously indicated the file had been tampered with.

New in DPlot Viewer 2.3.5.3 (May 5, 2014)

  • Bug fix: Reading 4-byte unformatted data was broken with the addition of support for 8-byte unformatted data in version 2.3.4.7.
  • The Label Points command had a few quirks when working with hidden curves.
  • Bug fix: List Peaks did not report the correct mean or number of points for "curves" consisting of a single point.

New in DPlot Viewer 2.3.5.1 (Mar 18, 2014)

  • DPlot will now correctly interpret text files with lines terminated by a carriage return only, as opposed to what most Windows users are accustomed to with a carriage return/line feed sequence.
  • Added a "Date separator" entry to the General Options dialog. This entry might be important for German users (or for users from any other country where the default date separator is a '.') who typically read text files in which the decimal point character is a '.'. (Version 2.3.4.6 added support for '.' as the date separator, but this broke DPlot for many German users who also used '.' as the decimal point.)
  • DPlot is a bit smarter about re-allocating arrays for unformatted data, both 4- and 8-byte files. In previous versions when it was found that the arrays were of insufficient size, DPlot used the power of 2 greater than or equal to the required size. Since the required size was known, in many cases this was overkill - particularly for millions of points. In this version DPlot will size the arrays to the exact size needed. In many cases this will make the difference in whether DPlot can successfully read the file or not. Another change fixes a bug that under some circumstances might have led to a complaint about being unable to allocate memory for 100 curves, though the file contained only one data set.
  • Bug fix: The filter coefficients for the relatively new CFCx filters were fouled up, particularly D1 and D2.
  • Bug fix: Strangely, this bug has been present from day 1 but it is only recently that anybody has noticed it. In previous versions of DPlot, when printing if you specified more than 1 copy you'd actually get the square of that number rather than the specified number. The problem was that DPlot was looping through that number of copies, and for each loop the printer driver was also printing that number of copies.

New in DPlot Viewer 2.3.4.7 (Feb 24, 2014)

  • The Playback feature now uses more modern settings for the Open dialog for videos.
  • Added a new file type that can be opened/saved. Unformatted binary (64-bit) is identical to the "Unformatted binary" type except that it saves data to 64-bit (8-byte) double-precision floating point values rather than 4-byte single-precision values. This might be important if you are working with large magnitude numbers with a small increment between points (date/time groups, for example) or if you have a large number of points (100,000 or so) and it is important that you preserve the increment between points.
  • Bug fix: Curve labels for plots using the Amplitude Limits feature might not have been aligned properly.
  • Bug fix: Version 2.3.4.4 included a change that caused contour lines to not be drawn if the corresponding line width was set to less than 0. This worked, but line widths resulting in a calculated pen width of 1 pixel (on most systems 0.02") were also not drawn if antialiasing was turned on.
  • Bug fix: Blank cells in the Z (3rd) column exported to DPlot via the XYZSurface Add-In command were treated as 0's, rather than properly being ignored.
  • Bug fix: Since Version 2.3.3.2 the default save folder might not have been preserved, depending on how a plot was created. The intent is to offer the last folder saved to as the default, which this version and those prior to 2.3.3.2 do.
  • Amended the FileSaveAs command to accept multiple |TITLEn| placeholders.
  • The Pacific EU file import plugin will now accept an options string when used with the FileOpen macro/DDE command.
  • When using the Zoom toolbar button or when zooming by dragging-and-clicking (assuming "Click and drag to zoom" under the General Options command is checked), you can restrict zooming to the X direction by pressing the Ctrl key or to the Y direction by pressing the Shift key. Whether using the toolbar button or clicking-and-dragging, the key must be pressed and held before the action is initiated. NOTE: This change necessitated a change in restricting the zoom rectangle to a square. This is now accomplished by pressing and holding the ALT key (previously SHIFT key).
  • The DeferMinMaxCheck command now applies to data sent to DPlot with XY, XYXY, and/or XYZ commands. Previously this command only affected data sent via calls to DPlot_AddData.
  • Added "Vertical Grid Lines Only" and "Horizontal Grid Lines Only" menu commands to DPlot Jr. This omission was an oversight. Programmatically, you've always been able to control this setting with an AxisType command.

New in DPlot Viewer 2.3.4.5 (Dec 17, 2013)

  • Version 2.3.4.4 was amended to accept multiple arguments (curve indices). Unfortunately this change broke SelectCurve(-1), which previously meant that all curves should be selected for subsequent operations. SelectCurve(-1) works as expected in this release.

New in DPlot Viewer 2.3.4.4 (Dec 14, 2013)

  • Added optional "Average Duplicate X's" and "Peak Y Values with Duplicate X's" for the Generate menu to the distribution for the licensed version of DPlot. For those users who have previously used these modules, both now allow you to select which curve to operate on as well as specify whether the generated data should replace the input.
  • Changed the SelectCurve macro/DDE command to accept multiple arguments (curve indices). In addition, the equivalent macro/DDE commands for all Edit menu commands that interactively allow you to select multiple curves now use this setting.
  • For 2D views of surface plots, if you set the major or minor contour line width values to less than 0, then the corresponding lines are not drawn. In previous versions those lines were drawn with a width of 1 pixel/printer dot.
  • Added ListPeaksOptions macro/DDE command.
  • Modified the Polynomial Curve Fit procedure to show dates/times if the number format for the X axis was a date and/or time. In previous versions the limits on the generated points were always shown as numbers, so a lack of precision might have resulted in the output extents being several seconds before or after the input extents.
  • Modified the $MEAN text placeholder to accept X limits in the same way that $YMIN and others work. For example $MEAN(2,20,50) returns the mean amplitude for curve 2 between X=20 and X=50 (inclusive). This change only applies to XY plots.
  • DPlot now uses version 3.15.4 of the FreeImage image library.
  • Bug fix: The List Peaks within a Range command on random 3D points might have crashed on some versions of Windows due to an uninitialized data problem.
  • Bug fix: Version 2.3.3.8 included a fix to eliminate excess white space for curve labels that overlapped a plot border. In some cases this "fix" might have caused DPlot to crash.
  • Bug fix: "Fixed" a problem with the Excel Add-In for 64-bit Excel 2013 (and subsequent versions). The code that removed the DPlot Add-In menu when you removed the Add-In might have caused runtime errors in that version of Excel. The down side to this change is that the DPlot menu will remain after removing the Add-In and until you restart that version of Excel.
  • Bug fix: The function parser (used by Y=f(X) and similar commands, as well as in text placeholders that used an equation) did not properly handle numbers with an exponent. For example LOG10(5.3E-7) balked because of the minus sign.

New in DPlot Viewer 2.3.4.3 (Jul 15, 2013)

  • Added right-click menu options to the legend of XY plots to snap the legend to one of a graph's four corners. See Anchor point>Snap to...
  • Added a Replace button (random 3D points) and Paste Z button (points on a rectangular grid) to the Edit Data dialogs of all 3D plot types. For random points this will replace the current data (X, Y, and Z values) with the clipboard contents. For points on a rectangular grid this will replace Z values with the clipboard contents, preserving X and Y. This might be handy if you frequently produce 3D surface or scatter plots with complicated setups: embedded images, long text notations, etc.
  • Bug fix: DPlot crashed when saving DPlot files with notes longer than 1024 characters.
  • Bug fix: For large framed notes the rectangle surrounding the note might have been a bit too small or too large for vertical text.
  • Bug fix: The Distance between points function for 3D surface plots with random points did not handle dragging the mouse to select points correctly.
  • Bug fix: There was a problem when reallocating arrays for XY plots with existing curves. If there was insufficient memory for the new array sizes, the old arrays might not have been restored and all values were set to 0's. And another: if in the same situation you attempted to allocate arrays such that the total number of points exceeded 2^32/8 (bytes per X or Y), DPlot might have crashed without warning.
  • Bug fix: There was a goof in the new Spline Fit dialog that caused the plugin to always operate on either the first or second curves, regardless of what selection you made in the plugin's dialog box.
  • Bug fix: Fixed a problem that has always existed for Generate plugins but only became noticeable with the last release's inclusion of the Spline Fit plugin: If you set the "Number of points per segment" to a value large enough that DPlot could not allocate enough memory to accomodate that new curve (e.g. 100 million or more points), the registry entry set by the plugin indicating inadequate array sizes was not reset. The result of this was that subsequent calls to that plugin would bypass the dialog box where you entered "Number of points per segment", because the plugin thought this was a subsequent call after successfully reallocating arrays.

New in DPlot Viewer 2.3.3.9 (Jun 24, 2013)

  • Added MIN and MAX operations to the Z=f(Z1,Z2) menu command.
  • Added a Spline Fit function to the Generate menu. This operates in much the same way the Equal Intervals command with the Cubic Spline method does, but allows for input that loops back in X - is not a function, in other words.
  • Added an option to the Histogram command to plot the frequency of a given bin rather than the count.
  • Added AND, NOT, OR, and XOR functions for use in Y=f(X), Operate on Y, and similar commands.
  • Bug fix: Text and arrows for point labels that were copied to the clipboard may have been incorrectly placed with standard (as opposed to enhanced) metafiles.
  • Bug fix: A roundoff error in axis label placement for 2D surface plots might have resulted in the last label being omitted.
  • Bug fix: With the XYYY Excel Add-In command, if you only selected one data column (correctly interpreted as Y, with X starting at 0 and incremented by 1.) and that column included a heading, the Add-In skipped over the first data point.

New in DPlot Viewer 2.3.3.8 (May 18, 2013)

  • Added ability to make more than 2 passes with the Filter command. This might be useful for very noisy data.
  • Added candlestick chart option to Open-High-Low-Close (OHLC) charts.
  • Added a "Number of points" option to the "List Peaks" function.
  • Bug fix: The recent ATAN2 option for the Z3=f(Z1,Z2) command worked correctly for points on a rectangular grid, but not at all for randomly-spaced points.
  • Bug fix: Curve labels might had added uneccessary white space to the right side of a plot.
  • Bug fix: With 2D views of contour plots of randomly-spaced 3D points, the legend might have been clipped in a copied bitmap produced by Copy Picture.
  • Bug fix: The "More Curve Fits" function might have crashed with some equation forms if you selected a curve to fit that contained a single data point. In this release those "curves" are not selectable.
  • Bug fix: Since version 2.3.2.3 there has been a rather obscure bug when using any of the Generate menu commands that result in a new document (FFT or Histogram, for example). If the original document contained any notes and you performed any operation on the generated document's data, then the Undo function did not work properly. Generally on a Redo all X and Y values were set to 0's.
  • Bug fix: DPlot crashed when zooming in, then out, with the mouse wheel while pressing the CTRL key (restricting zooming to the X direction) if the plot included multiple Y axes.
  • Expanded the FORTRAN DPLOTLIB examples to perform many more functions. Currently this has been done for WATCOM, g77, and Silverfrost (formerly Salford) examples. Others may follow in a future release.
  • The ZGrid command of the Excel Add-In is now much more efficient when you simply select column headings rather than the rectangle containing your data. And it now will correctly interpret evenly-spaced Y values when you select column headings and send the data to DPlot as points on a rectangular grid, rather than randomly-spaced points. This is important if your goal is to produce 3D bar charts.

New in DPlot Viewer 2.3.3.6 (Mar 18, 2013)

  • Added Open-High-Low-Close (OHLC) chart option. This is primarily useful for those tracking stock prices.
  • Added X=f(T), Y=g(T), Z=h(T) command on the Generate menu, which allows you to generate points in a 3D scatter plot with X, Y, and Z all a user-defined function of a fourth independent parameter T.
  • Added entries for the SAE J211 CFC filters to the Filter command on the Edit menu. This is mostly a matter of convenience to those who crash cars for a living: the filter coefficents are defined here.
  • Modified the MultipleXAxes and MultipleYAxes commands so that they will accept an equation as input.
  • Extents for scales using "Calendar Date" number formatting are now rounded to the nearest integer (nearest day). Though technically correct before, previous versions were visually confusing if, for example, the low extent was at some time other than midnight since the time was not shown.
  • The setup program now copies examples.xls to the DPlot folder below your "My Documents" folder.
  • Bug fix: Previous versions of the Excel Add-In for DPlot might have caused 64-bit Excel 2013 to crash (after successfully creating a plot).
  • Bug fix: Changing colors in an XY plot (with no other changes) did not result in prompting you to save the plot when it was closed.
  • Bug fix: If you erased a hidden curve, the hidden flag was not reset. If you then performed some operation that created a new curve (which filled the slot occupied by the previously erased curve), the new curve was hidden.
  • Bug fix: The plugin examples contained the wrong header file DPLOT.H.

New in DPlot Viewer 2.3.3.5 (Feb 5, 2013)

  • Updated the Garmin GPX file import plugin to import heartrate information stored between tags. This includes Nike+ files exported as GPX and possibly other devices. If you have a GPS device that records heartrate and exports to GPX but heartrate is not supported by this plugin, of course let us know.
  • Added AxisArrowheads macro/DDE command.
  • Added ATAN2 operator to the Z3=f(Z1,Z2) command on the Generate menu for 3D surfaces.
  • DPlot files opened by double-clicking in Explorer or dragging-and-dropping on to the DPlot window now reset the default folder for opening files in the same way that the File>Open menu command works. In particular this might make a difference for you when using the Directory(1) macro command.
  • Bug fix: A SelectCurve command prior to an EditSmooth command did nothing. Generally every curve on the plot would be smoothed.
  • Bug fix: Version 2.3.3.2's change allowing you to print multiple plots with the placement determined by the order the plots were selected in was not implemented correctly, making it difficult to deselect the last plot that was selected.
  • Bug fix: In all previous versions if you used a text placeholder for a parameter in a macro command, e.g. [ManualScale(=$(XMIN),...], then the equation was replaced by a character string representation of the number with no more than 7 significant figures (identically to how the default number format works on the coordinate axes). In most cases this was fine, but didn't work so well in the case of date/time groups. For example 1 October 2012 9:00 PM was evaluated as 41183.88 (9:07:12 PM) rather than the exact 41183.875. In this release up to 16 significant figures are used in this situation.
  • Bug fix: DPlot crashed if every point in one or more curves was outside the limits set with the Amplitude Limits menu command.
  • Bug fix: 2D views of surface plots were not printed correctly if either the X or Y scale factors were negative.

New in DPlot Viewer 2.3.3.3 (Sep 26, 2012)

  • Bug fix: On an XY plot if minor grid lines were used on the Y axis and the minor grid lines used a different color than the major grid lines, DPlot would redraw the major grid lines on the X axis so that they would not be obscured by the minor Y lines. This worked fine unless the X axis used one of the calendar date formats. In that case the major lines were redrawn at a fixed interval, e.g. 30 days instead of one month. This bug has been present for over a year but only recently discovered by user PaulT. Thanks, Paul.
  • Minor change to reading DPlot files: "Print Caption" is turned off by default and only turned on if the file contains an instruction to do so. This differs from previous versions that tended to use the setting from the last plot that was opened.
  • One user reported a problem with the self-extracting zip file for the DPLOTLIB files that was used for the first time in the version 2.3.3.2. This release doesn't use a zip file.

New in DPlot Viewer 2.3.3.2 (Sep 24, 2012)

  • The distribution now includes a 64-bit version of DPLOTLIB.DLL and 64-bit source code examples in C, C#, and VB.NET.
  • If a note that is automatically generated for a vector plot with the "Show color key" option is removed on the Note dialog, "Show color key" is turned off. In the last release the note would be regenerated with default options every time you removed it, which was a bit confusing.
  • Changed the behavior of the Multiple Plots dialog for printing multiple graphs on the same page. The order of the plots is now the order in which they are selected. In previous versions the plots were arranged in the order they were opened or created; selection order was ignored.
  • Added the ability to specify the line width and/or symbol size for the mean/median in Box and Whisker plots, and fixed the previously-ignored mean line width entry for Dot graphs. In addition all lines are now drawn with squared off endcaps for a cleaner appearance.
  • Added a mask option to the FillBetween macro/DDE command. This is equivalent to the Copy/Mask radio buttons on the Fill Between Curves dialog.
  • The document window caption added with a Caption command is now used as the default filename for a plot, with the addition of a ".grf" extension. If a user then saves the file, this will be used as the default filename. (In previous versions the filename would be blank.)
  • Added a line and/or symbol drawing to the Legend/Labels dialog that is updated when the curve index is changed. This should help immediately recognize a curve when the "Curve no." entry is changed.
  • Added EditRemoveSpikes macro/DDE command, which performs the same operation as the Remove Random Spikes command on the Edit menu for 2D data.
  • Bug fix: If you used Save Preferences on a plot that included version 2.3.3.1's change allowing a color key on vector plots, then subsequently used Get Preferences to read those settings with that same or a similar plot that also used that color key feature, you'd end up with an additional new color key.
  • Bug fix: On 2D contour plots for which the legend was not drawn, images copied to the clipboard might have had the right-most X axis label cropped.

New in DPlot Viewer 2.3.3.1 (Sep 10, 2012)

  • Added several new options for vector plots. You can use up to 8 colors (previous limit was 2), draw a color key, and specify the magnitudes associated with each color. Added an option to the VectorPlot command to include a heading for the optional color key, added several new options to the VectorPlotOptions command, and added a new VectorPlotColors command.
  • XY and XYXY macro/DDE commands will now accept coordinates in the text placeholder form $X(i,j), $Y(i,j). Previous versions would accept only numbers.
  • Added options to the Directory macro/DDE command that allow you to set the default directory to the last folder used by manual File Open, Append, or Save As commands.
  • Modified the behavior of the Histogram and SwitchX macro/DDE commands so that the active document for any subsequent macro commands becomes the newly-created document. In the case of SwitchX this only applies to creating a new document.
  • Bug fix: Including the "Coefficient of variation" in the Group Summary of 1D plots caused DPlot to crash if the mean of any group was 0. (Essentially an untrapped divide by 0 error.)

New in DPlot Viewer 2.3.3.0 (Jul 30, 2012)

  • Added Replace Data command on the Edit menu and corresponding EditReplaceData macro/DDE command. This command allows you to replace the data in a destination curve with the data from a source curve, then delete the source curve. This command is especially useful if you have a saved plot for which one or more curves should be updated. That source curve might be added with File>Append, Paste, by generating a curve with Y=f(X), etc.
  • DPlot will now read up to 4 title lines from CSV and text files at the start of the file. Previous versions were limited to 3 lines.
  • DPLOTLIB programming examples are now an optional component of the setup program. In versions 2.3.2.8 and 2.3.2.9 they were automatically installed.
  • Bug fix: The FileSaveAs macro command failed when attempting to save a file to a UNC path.

New in DPlot Viewer 2.3.2.9 (Jul 11, 2012)

  • Bug fix: Version 2.3.2.8 attempted to fix a problem with the legend in XY plots being clipped when printed, and it worked well if there was a legend. If there wasn't, the plot was generally printed too small, making room for a non-existant legend.

New in DPlot Viewer 2.3.2.8 (Jul 8, 2012)

  • Added support for Delphi for calls to DPLOTLIB.DLL. All code has been provided by Serge Astaf'ev. Thank you, Serge! DPLOTLIB example programs and source (all supported languages) are now included with the distributions for the full version of DPlot and may be found in the \DPLOTLIB folder below dplot.exe.
  • Added Xmin, Xmax, Ymin, and Ymax to the status bar display for 3D/4D plots. These values are for the visible portion of the plot, which might have been changed by zooming or by using the Extents/Intervals/Size command.
  • Added $VZMIN, $VZMAX, $VZAVG, $VXMIN, $VXMAX, $VYMIN, and $VYMAX text shortcuts. The latter four correspond to the values mentioned above. The first 3 correspond to the Z values shown in the status bar in previous versions.
  • The X values consisting of times are always sequential General Options setting was previously ignored for data sent to DPlot via DDE (Excel Add-In, for example). So if your input times passed through midnight one or more times, the plot was a jumbled mess with a maximum extent of 1 day.
  • Bug fix: The sequential time setting mentioned above was respected for Copy/Paste operations but was handled incorrectly, with 24 (hours) added to input values rather than 1 (1 day). This bug came up when adding the Time of day (fractional days) number format.
  • Bug fix: If you moved the legend of an XY plot outside the extents of the plot, the legend might get clipped when printed, though there was plenty of room on the page if the entire plot was shifted in the opposite direction.
  • Bug fix: The "Y=A+B*ln(X)+C*(ln(X))^2+..." equation form of the "More Curve Fits" plugin failed for non-positive Y values.
  • Bug fix: The Differentiate command flubbed the first X value for the quadratic method unless Replace existing curves was checked.

New in DPlot Viewer 2.3.2.6 (Jun 9, 2012)

  • Better results for saved bitmap images on Windows Vista and later Windows versions. DPlot now uses a workaround for a Windows problem when saving bitmap images with a positive resolution value. On most desktop systems Windows correctly reports the physical size of the screen, which is used to scale line widths, symbol sizes, position for labels, etc. On (at least) Windows 7, Windows reports a very wrong value for that width (for example a 16 inch wide display is reported as over 26 inches wide). This error resulted in distorted bitmaps saved on these systems if you used a resolution setting over 100 dpi. On Windows Vista and later versions, DPlot now ignores that value and estimates the physical screen width based on a 100 dpi screen, which coupled with the following change makes bitmap images saved in DPlot consistent regardless of comptuer system.
  • Saved bitmap image sizes should now be consistent on all systems.
  • When saving bitmap images with a resolution setting greater than 100 dpi, DPlot now scales the bitmap dimensions up by /(100 dpi). Previously DPlot used /. Although consistent with the gimmick used to create high resolution images, this resulted in inconsistent bitmap sizes saved on different systems with the identical save settings.
  • X,Y|,Z| Labels are now saved to and restored from preference files.
  • The Find Volume Under Surface command now also calculates the average Z for points above and below the specified base Z.
  • All plugins distributed with DPlot now take double-precision arrays (8-byte floating point) rather than single-precision (4-byte). Single-precision plugins from other sources are still supported, though not recommended for plugin authors for reasons that follow.

New in DPlot Viewer 2.3.2.5 (Jun 9, 2012)

  • Bug fix: Rearranging a few things in 2.3.2.4 to handle polar plot legends ended up breaking the legend resulting from using Y=f(X,Y1,Y2,...).

New in DPlot Viewer 2.3.2.4 (May 29, 2012)

  • Added DeleteImage macro command, which removes images added with a previous InsertImage command or the Insert Image command on the Options menu.
  • Amended calculation of $MEAN, $STDEV, and similar placeholders to take account of Amplitude Limits settings. Points outside those limits are now ignored.
  • Amended legend generation for Y=f(X) and similar commands for polar coordinates. For polar plots, X or x are replaced by θ and Y or y are replaced by r. Note that this substitution only takes place if Polar Coordinates has been specified before generating the new curve.
  • Expanded the capabilities of the Differentiate a Curve command. You may now perform this operation on multiple curves and optionally replace the source curves with the result. If the source curve has a legend then the output curve's legend is set to "∂/∂x( )". Similarly, the legend for a curve created with the Integrate a Curve command will now be set to "∫".
  • Amended behavior of ColumnsAre macro command. [ColumnsAre(0)] did esentially nothing in previous versions: the "Specify Columns to Plot" dialog was still shown if that was the default setting. You could only bypass that dialog by specifying all of the column numbers. In this version [ColumnsAre(0)] results in the same behavior as not checking "Pick Columns to Plot" box: X values are read from the first column and subsequent columns are used for Y values all sharing the same X.
  • When saving tab- or comma-separated text files, DPlot always wrote dates using "M/d/yyyy" format. This made alignment in text editors problematic, but worse, made the files unworkable for reading into DPlot if you had set Assume input dates are of the form d/m/y under the General Options menu command. This version uses either "MM/dd/yyyy" or "dd/MM/yyyy" date formatting.
  • Added a "Backward" option to the "Make Step Plot" plugin module on the Generate menu.
  • Bug fix: DPlot has for many versions interpreted "NAN", "nan", "NaN" as "not a number" (a divide by zero or other math error) in text files. So it was interpreted as a number, though an illegal one that was skipped over. This worked fine unless you had a column of labels with one or more entries containing that sequence, e.g. Nancy or Financial. In that case DPlot would usually decide that the next line was where the data started, since the data types didn't match (label vs. number). This version is a bit smarter about detecting NaN's. NaN's are detected for "NAN", "nan", or "NaN" in a 3 (and only 3) character column, and for "#QNAN;" in any position, which is common in Campbell Scientific Datalogger files.
  • Bug fix: If "Time of day (fractional days)" number format was used on date and time values then only the time (not the date) was displayed in the Extents/Intervals/Size dialog. When you clicked OK DPlot attempted to read a date and time from the text boxes and set the date to 0 (December 31, 1899). In this release DPlot still displays times only, but preserves the initial date and adds it back to text box values on exit.

New in DPlot Viewer 2.3.2.3 (Apr 2, 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.

New in DPlot Viewer 2.3.1.8 (Aug 8, 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.

New in DPlot Viewer 2.3.1.6 (Jul 15, 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.

New in DPlot Viewer 2.3.1.4 (Jul 4, 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.

New in DPlot Viewer 2.3.1.1 (May 31, 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.

New in DPlot Viewer 2.3.1.0 (Apr 11, 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.

New in DPlot Viewer 2.3.0.8 (Mar 7, 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.

New in DPlot Viewer 2.3.0.7 (Feb 7, 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

New in DPlot Viewer 2.3.0.6 (Jan 24, 2011)

  • When zooming with the mouse wheel, you may now restrict zooming to the X direction by pressing the CTRL key, or to the Y direction by pressing the SHIFT key.
  • For XY plots you may now hide a curve by pointing to it and clicking the middle mouse button (mouse wheel on the majority of mice). If the middle mouse button is clicked when the mouse does not point to a curve, all curves are made visible.
  • Modified "Make Step Plot" plugin (licensed version only) to include an option to center the steps on the input X values. Thanks to Dr. Ian Crawford for the suggestion.
  • Improved performance of antialiasing. In all previous versions the antialiasing performed for line segments by DPlot was very inefficient with all or portions of line segments that were outside the plot limits (after zooming, for example).
  • Made a change to the drawing order for XY plots when minor grid lines are used and the minor grid line color is different than the major grid line color: In previous versions the minor grid lines for the Y axis would overlay the major grid lines for the X axis. This was only noticeable when the minor grid lines used a different color than the major grid lines. In this version minor grid lines will not obscure major grid lines.
  • Bug fix: If multiple Y axes were used, the title for the 2nd Y axis was placed far right enough that it was impossible to overlap any numbers (or dates, etc.) on the X axis. So for dates/times on X, for example, the 2nd Y axis title was positioned much farther to the right than it would be for the default number format. The intent was probably good at one time, but since this same check isn't performed for the primary Y axis it was, at best, overkill.
  • Bug fix: If "Axes at 0" was checked and grid lines were used on the Y axis, the bottom of the plot would be drawn (actually overdrawn) with the grid line color. This was particularly noticeable if the axes line width was the same as or smaller than the grid line width and used a different color.

New in DPlot Viewer 2.3.0.5 (Jan 9, 2011)

  • Added options for image export. For GIF and PNG images, you can now specify that the plot background color should be transparent. (Whether the target application respects the transparency setting is outside DPlot's control. Google Earth, for one, does honor this setting.) For both GIF and PNG images, antialiasing is forced off and the standard Windows' font antialiasing is turned off. You may get better results saving to 32-bit PNG, particularly when importing images into Google Earth. Updated the SetPluginImageDims macro/DDE command to take account of this new capability.
  • Note: Whether output is to an 8-bit GIF or 32-bit PNG, all antialiasing (including text) will be turned off. Depending on your needs and what is possible, you can produce a better-looking image by saving the background image, cropped to the appropriate extents, and importing that background image into DPlot rather than going the other way: saving a transparent image in DPlot and importing that image into some other application. In the former case, all DPlot graphics are drawn onto a background image that is already in place, so antialiasing is not an issue: if antialiasing is turned on or you use one of the Windows default antialiasing features for text, those lines/symbols/text will be drawn as expected, with the proper antialiasing. See, for example, the Background Images topic in the blog.
  • Modified the behavior of tick marks on 2D views of 3D data. If both the X and Y axis number formats are set to "None" and a plot has no X,Y,Z Labels, then tick marks are not drawn.
  • Bug fix: It was possible to cause DPlot to crash if you used the incorrect number of arguments to a text placeholder (e.g. $X) in an equation.

New in DPlot Viewer 2.3.0.4 (Dec 15, 2010)

  • Bug fix: The "Swap X,Y" command on the Edit menu was inadvertently omitted for 4D surface plots, and did not work for 4D scatter plots.
  • Bug fix: If you dragged a corner of a 2D plot using the mouse to resize the graph and inverted either the width or height (e.g. dragged the left corner right past the right corner), DPlot would enter an endless loop attempting to draw the plot within a box with a negative dimension.
  • Bug fix: Corrected a problem that might have caused a crash with 2D views of 3D data on a rectangular grid. If "Show coordinates in popup window when mouse hovers over data point" was checked, DPlot sometimes crashed when working with large data sets due to a division by 0 problem.

New in DPlot Viewer 2.3.0.3 (Nov 22, 2010)

  • Notes are now saved to and restored from preference files.
  • If you used a non-standard cursor for the "Normal Select" pointer, toolbar tooltips might have been obscured by the cursor in all previous versions.
  • Toolbar tooltips now use the same font used in your menus. On Vista and Windows 7 this should make the tooltips a bit easier to read.
  • Bug fix: A change to the plugin interface several releases ago that was intended to clean up unused curves in XY plots was inadvertently applied to all data types. As a result the "Bitmap to 3D" plugin did not display a plot until after you performed some action to edit the data.
  • Bug fix: Version 2.3.0.2 included a bug which caused the plot background color to be drawn incorrectly for 3D views of points on a rectangular grid.

New in DPlot Viewer 2.3.0.2 (Nov 13, 2010)

  • The $AREA text shortcut now works with 3D and 4D surface plots, reporting the plot's surface area. The resulting text will use the number formatting of the Z axis.
  • Added the ability to draw the legend for 3D and 4D surface plots on various sides of the plot. Previous versions forced the location to the right side. Currently these options are only available via the right-click menu for the legend and are not supported for scatter plots. The ContourLegend command can be used to set the legend placement.
  • Added an option for 3D views to display a graphic of the X,Y,Z coordinate axes in the lower left corner of the plot. Currently this option is only available via right-click menu (Orientation Key). NOTE: No effort is made to include this graphic in the clipped region of saved bitmap images or bitmaps/metafiles copied to the clipboard. In other words it might be there; it might not. And it might be cropped. This will likely change in a future release. Like the 3D legend options above, this option is only offered via right-click menu in a quasi-effort to hide it until all the kinks are worked out: it is possible that with this version and using both options that you'll end up with plot attributes overlapping.
  • Added "Monthly Peak" plugin for the licensed version, which is handy for finding the monthly peak value within a time series (daily cumulative sales figures, for example).
  • Bug fix: Probability scale with small or large probabilities (less than 0.0001% or greater than 99.9999%) might have resulted in an endless loop.

New in DPlot Viewer 2.3.0.1 (Nov 13, 2010)

  • Bug fix: Another one introduced with version 2.2.9.9 - calendar dates w/ times in text boxes were not interpreted correctly.

New in DPlot Viewer 2.3.0.0 (Oct 29, 2010)

  • Bug fix:
  • Version 2.2.9.9 introduced a bug that broke the keyboard shortcuts for changing the view angles of a 3D plot.

New in DPlot Viewer 2.2.9.8 (Oct 8, 2010)

  • Bug fix: The document window list was shown on the View menu for 4D plots rather than the correct Window menu.
  • Bug fix: The Define Boundary command did not work with 4D data (only 3D).

New in DPlot Viewer 2.2.9.7 (Oct 5, 2010)

  • The Month number format will now use the full spelling of the month, e.g. "January" rather than "Jan", if the date format includes "MMMM".
  • The $AREA text placeholder may now include a range in X between which the area is calculated, similar to how the $YMIN, $YMAX, etc. shortcuts work.
  • Added character-formatting buttons to the X,Y(,Z) Labels feature.
  • Added "Open" and "Save as" buttons to the Y=f(X), X=f(T), Y=g(T), and Y=f(X,Y1,Y2,...) command screens. This might be handy if you have an operation that you frequently use and you use this command often enough that a particular operation migrates out of the most-recently-used list (where applicable).
  • Added a "Click to zoom" option to the General Options screen. If checked, you can zoom on 2D plots by clicking and dragging your mouse (without first clicking the Zoom toolbar button). If unchecked, DPlot behaves as before: clicking and dragging pans the plot. Whether checked or not, the keyboard arrow keys may still be used to pan.
  • For USDA Soil Classifications on triangle plots, changed "Silty Loam" to "Silt Loam" in accordance with the USDA's documentation.
  • Bug fix: The "Stacked points are..." note in the lower right corner of a dot graph might have overlapped the numbers along the horizontal axis when copying or saving the plot to a metafile format.
  • Bug fix: Using the Edit Data command on a curve associated with the second (right) Y axis, mouse clicks were scaled to the left axis rather than the right.
  • Bug fix: One more fix for bar charts similar to that made with version 2.2.9.5. If "Unique colors for each bar" was checked then the same problem with outline pen widths for all but the first bar and non-hollow bars existed.
  • Bug fix: Point labels using $X, $Y, or $Z shortcuts immediately followed by a non-space character (as in $Ykg) did not work properly.
  • Bug fix: Error bars on horizontal bar charts were not drawn properly.
  • Bug fix: When interpreting text files, if the heading lines contained commas, semicolons, or tabs but the data columns were separated by spaces, DPlot would erroneously interpret the first data line as a heading and (usually) use that line as the legend.
  • Bug fix: Previous versions correctly handled date and time values in the first two columns of text files when the date and time were not delineated with quotation marks or when the date and time group in total was delineated with quotation marks, whether there was an intervening comma or not. But DPlot did not correctly combine a data and time when both groups were individually delineated with quotation marks, as in "10/3/2010","6:45:00 PM". This version correctly handles that combination.

New in DPlot Viewer 2.2.9.6 (Sep 13, 2010)

  • Added menu options and corresponding toolbar buttons for XY plots to draw grid lines in the horizontal or vertical direction only. Modified the GridLines macro command to take account of this new capability.
  • Bug fix: If you used "Calendar Date" or "Date and Time" number formats on the X axis with a 3D view of 3D/4D data, DPlot might have entered an endless loop while drawing the X axis grid lines and labels. Thanks, Scott Englander, for the assist in tracking this down.
  • Bug fix: The Normalize command on the Edit menu erroneously demanded that the input curve(s) be sorted in increasing X order. Since the operation is independent of X, sort order is irrelevant.
  • Bug fix: The Normalize command might not have used the correct minimum and maximum Y values if the plot was produced by a series of calls to the DPLOTLIB function DPlot_AddData in which the min/max values were intentionally not found due to a previous call to the DPLOTLIB function DeferMinMaxCheck.
  • Bug fix: With a dependent second Y axis on XY plots, DPlot might have allowed too much space on the right side of the plot when figuring out the correct placement of the 2nd Y axis label.
  • Bug fix: Under some circumstances the "Use N/S/E/W suffix" option for number formatting might have displayed E for N, W for S on 3D surface plots.

New in DPlot Viewer 2.2.9.5 (Aug 28, 2010)

  • Added "Outline symbols in black" to the Symbol Styles dialog for 3D scatter plots. In previous versions this setting was turned on by default and not optional.
  • Relaxed the constraints on determining whether all labels would fit along the Y axis. In previous versions DPlot might have skipped over labels when it wasn't strictly necessary to do so.
  • The coefficient boxes on the Multiple Axes dialog can now accept equations, e.g. "pi/180"
  • The Equal Intervals command on the Edit menu now allows you to specify a start and stop X value, which might be handy if you want the generated curve to start at some "nice" multiple of the interval. Modified the EditEqualInts command to take into account this new capability.
  • For 3D scatter plots you may now set the line color drawn between points equal to the color of the first endpoint; in all previous versions the color was forced to black.
  • Relaxed constraints that prevented DPlot from handling mouse movement messages (displaying coordinates in the status bar, for example) while a DDE conversation was active. This check was done to prevent hogging the processor while another application was attempting to send data to DPlot at a rapid rate. But many legacy applications establish a conversation with DPlot and do not disconnect until the application is terminated. In this release the check is not against a conversation being active, but against adding data via a call to DPlot_AddData. After calling DPlot_AddData DPlot behaves as before: mouse movement messages are ignored until the conversation is terminated.
  • Bug fix: The lines used for the outline of bars in a bar chart have been fouled up for all but the first bar since the capability of adding error bars was added to DPlot. This might not have been noticeable for thin lines and/or solid fills.
  • Note placement was fouled up for vertical orientation and either center or right justification.

New in DPlot Viewer 2.2.9.4 (Jul 29, 2010)

  • Bug fix: A recent change correcting the calculation of the plot size plus axis labels for triangle plots ended up fouling up this calculation for all other plot types, such that axis labels were clipped. The problem was likely not noticeable if you sized the plot with Options>Extents/Intervals/Size, but was quite noticeable if the plot occupied most of the document window. Thanks to Richard Swaim for pointing out the problem.

New in DPlot Viewer 2.2.9.2 (Jul 2, 2010)

  • Y=f(X,Y1,Y2,...) now allows you to specify a curve from which all X values will be taken. In previous versions the output curve would always have evenly-spaced points between the from X and to X values. Added FXY1Y2_XFrom macro/DDE command to take account of this new capability. Developers please note: This setting is persistent and might effect the behavior of the AddCurves, Compare, DivideCurves, FunctionOfXY1Y2, Lump, MultiplyCurves, and SubtractCurves commands.
  • Error bars may now be drawn in a color other than black. You may also specify an error bar frequency on the Error Bars dialog. (Previous versions used the symbol frequency setting). Modified the ErrorBar macro/DDE command to take account of these new capabilities.
  • Find Intersections dialog is now resizable, which might be handy when working with curves that have a long descriptive legend.
  • Added ContourResetExtents macro/DDE command, which is equivalent to the "Use actual displayed limits" setting on the Contour Options dialog.
  • Bug fix: For the last several releases [Color(-2,r,g,b)] has correctly set the color of minor grid lines on XY plots, but was not used to set the border color on 3D/4D plots as described in the Help.

New in DPlot Viewer 2.2.9.1 (Jun 17, 2010)

  • Removed a vestige from the days when DPlot did not allow you to set the plot background color: If the Windows window background color was the same as the selected grid color, grid color was forced to black.
  • Added zoom and pan buttons to the Distance from dialog for 2D data.
  • For XY plots, added $XYMIN and $XYMAX text placeholders.
  • Added Restrict mouse panning to H/V/45° menu command to the View menu. If checked, then panning a 2D plot by dragging the mouse is restricted to horizontal, vertical, or 45° increments. If this feature is unchecked, as before, you can get this same restriction by pressing the Shift key while dragging.
  • For the Generate Mesh command, the Extrapolate... checkbox is now disabled for bivariate interpolation, simply because that feature was prone to blow up with nonsense values and/or crash DPlot. Added quadratic interpolation method, for which the output is calculated by applying weighting factors proportional to the inverse of the square of the distance to a selected number of input points.
  • Bug fix: The "More Curve Fits" function might have crashed with the equation form y=A(x+B)^C if one or more y values were exactly equal to 0.
  • Bug fix: For bar charts with the Shaded Bars option turned off, the second and all subsequent bars were drawn in black within standard and enhanced metafiles.

New in DPlot Viewer 2.2.9.0 (May 24, 2010)

  • Added a "Show Example Plots" command to the Help menu, which hopefully along with the "How was this graph created?" links within the plots themselves will help new users.
  • Improved the performance of the Switch Independent Variable command, particularly for large data sets. In previous versions, unless all curves had the same number of points and the same X values at every point, the time required was proportional to N^2, where N = number of points in each curve. In this release if operating on curves for which X is monotonically increasing (which should include almost all data for which this function is meaningful) then the time required is proportional to N rather than N^2. If that doesn't grab your attention... this operation with 1 million points might have taken a bit more that 2 hours before, but should take a bit less than 1 second now on fast processors. Thanks to Richard Swaim for pointing out the problem.
  • The Excel Add-In now works properly with the 64-bit version of Excel 2010 (as well as, as before, the 32-bit version of Excel 2010 and all previous versions back to Excel 95).
  • Bug fix: Version 2.2.8.8 introduced a new bug with the FilePrint macro command. As far as we know that change only affected the Adobe PDF print driver, but it is possible that other printers were affected. The result was either a "StartDoc failed" error message, or a more wordy message concerning missing resources.
  • Bug fix: This one has been around for a long while. An "optimization" in previous versions of DPlot that based the decision of whether to throw out or keep a saved bitmap of a graph when resizing a document ended up causing strange problems, primarily with very large data sets (for which, of course, the optimization was designed in the first place). You might have ended up with the wrong plot being displayed when you closed a document or activated a different document with the Window menu. This version keeps the good features of that optimization and throws out the bad.
  • Bug fix: Right-click menu options in DPlot Jr for 3D data were not consistent with DPlot Jr capabilities. (Some right-click menu commands that should not have been shown rightfully did nothing, other right-click commands which should have been shown were not.)

New in DPlot Viewer 2.2.8.8 (May 10, 2010)

  • Added many new options for the new background image feature. The "background" can now be drawn in the foreground. You can specify a global transparency value that is applied to the entire image and/or a transparent background color. Alpha channel in 32-bit PNG images and transparent pixels in GIF and 8-bit PNG images is now handled as you'd expect in an image editor, for both foreground and background images.
  • Added better support for non-US date separators. In this version the Control Panel sDate entry is interpreted correctly when reading files, pasting data from the Clipboard, or reading dates from text boxes. DPlot continues to accept either a slash or dash as the date separator regardless of the Control Panel setting.
  • For logarithmic scales, added checks to ensure axis labels do no overlap.
  • The FFT dialog now allows you to specify the units for the X values of the input. Previous versions forced the units based on an interpretation of the X axis title. This version also allows you to enter units that are not necessarily a measure of time. In that case the FFT will have an X axis label of "cycles/".
  • Similarly, added an "other" entry for X units to the Filter dialog, which only serves to change the frequency label for the bandpass and bandstop filters.
  • The Fill to Y reference line option of the Fill Between Curves menu command now allows you to specify a fill above and/or below the line. Previous versions drew fills both above and below the line (where applicable).
  • Added Tile Horizontally command to the Window menu. Previously this arrangement could only be achieved by a WindowTile(1) macro command.
  • Added Apply buttons to several dialog boxes (more to follow) and shifted the placement of the larger dialogs to the upper left corner so that you can better see the effect of your changes when using Apply. For all dialog boxes that include an Apply button, pressing Cancel after Apply reverts to the settings that were in effect when the dialog box was first opened, which differs a bit from previous versions.
  • Bug fix: For semicolon-separated columns DPlot did not correctly handle files with a trailing semicolon.
  • Bug fix: RND() crashed. Under the same circumstances you will now get a friendlier "Illegal argument" error.
  • Bug fix: Printing with the FilePrint macro command resulted in portrait orientation, regardless of whether you had previously used the Page Setup menu command or FilePageSetup macro command to set the orientation to landscape.
  • Bug fix: In the More Curve Fits module, the procedure always failed with a spurious "Overflow error" for the exponential form Y=A+B*exp(C*X) if B was a negative number. (No overflow actually occurred; the error was due to a faulty check meant to prevent overflows.)
  • Bug fix: For saved bitmap images (BMP, GIF, PNG, etc.) of 2D surface plots, if you selected Crop white space and the contour legend was shown, the right edge of the image was wide by the legend width. In other words, enough space on the right was added for 2 copies of the legend.
  • Bug fix: An uninitialized data problem might have caused DPlot to crash for fill region(s) with the Fill to Y reference line option.
  • Bug fix: Another uninitialized data problem might have broken text shortcuts used in equations within macro commands or text boxes in dialog boxes. For example $XMIN used in a ManualScale command might have been erroneously interpreted as the minimum X for curve 1 rather than the minimum for all curves.

New in DPlot Viewer 2.2.8.5 (Apr 25, 2010)

  • Added the ability to specify a background image
  • GPS-recording with a background image taken from Google Earth
  • for 2D graphs (with the exception of polar charts and triangle plots). Added corresponding SetBackgroundImage macro/DDE command.
  • Added Normalize command to the Edit menu for XY plots, along with corresponding EditNormalize macro/DDE command. This command scales the Y values to 0-1 or 0-100.
  • Added a right-click menu option for XY plots to "Add $X, $Y Label", which saves a bit of effort over using Edit mode and/or the Label Points command on the Text menu. Labels produced with this command will be framed and opaque. As with all other labels, attributes can be changed with the right-click menu or by double-clicking on the label.
  • Added right-click menu options for the legend (in XY plots) and text notations to change the anchor point of those objects.
  • Most-recently-used file list has been expanded from 4 to 8 files. Also took a few steps to avoid duplicate names in this list.
  • A couple of new mouse operations for XY plots: Ctrl+click on a curve brings up the Symbol/Line Styles dialog with the clicked-on curve selected. Shift+click on a curve brings up the Colors dialog with, again, the clicked-on curve selected.
  • Added 2 smaller symbol sizes to the right-click menu for curves: 0.05" and 0.075", 4pt and 5pt, and 1mm and 2mm. (The sizes and units shown are dependent on the "Default dimensions" setting.)
  • For 2D views of 3D data, the axis labels might have overlapped labels added with the X,Y,Z Labels command. (This is still a problem with 3D views; no attempt is made to prevent that overlap. If your labels overlap the corresponding axis title you can shift the axis title with leading \n's).
  • DPlot is a bit more flexible with tick mark intervals on date scales. In this version you can specify a tick mark interval of 3 or 4 months and that is the interval you'll get. (In previous versions the interval would have been forced to 2 months in both cases).
  • Modified the behavior of the SetPanFraction macro/DDE command. In previous versions the pan value was forced to the limits 0.01 to 1.0. In this version 0 is allowed. When set to 0, DPlot will not automatically pan a plot when a) X values sent via a call to DPlot_AddData or with one of the XY commands exceed the right extent of a plot and b) the ManualScale command has been used.
  • Added a bit of syntax checking to the function parser. In previous versions, for example, "exp^5" (rather than "exp(5)") would have crashed rather than returning an error.
  • Bug fix: In some cases DPlot did not correctly handle text files with one or more lines in which the last data column was blank, but the previous column was not blank.
  • Bug fix: DPlot did not correctly handle "quoted" column headings in text files that consisted of two successive quotation marks.
  • Bug fix: Partially-transparent symbols were drawn fully opaque in the legend.
  • Bug fix: Syntax errors with the Operate on X command on the Edit menu might have resulted in a not especially helpful "No error. How did you get here?" message.
  • Bug fix: When dragging the corners of a 2D plot to resize, if the document was not maximized and you dragged the cursor outside the document window's client area, the text showing the plot dimensions might have been left on the screen or DPlot might have immediately gone into "pan" mode, drawing a line with arrowhead on the screen that would not go away until the plot was redrawn.

New in DPlot Viewer 2.2.8.4 (Apr 25, 2010)

  • Added options for reference lines to draw a frame around the reference line label and/or make the label opaque. Modified the RefLine command to take advantage of this new capability.
  • Added options to 1) Draw contour line labels horizontally. The default is for the label to be oriented with the contour line at the point it is drawn, and 2) Use either black or white for the line labels based on the luminance of the background color for "Both lines and shades". By default the labels will always be drawn in black for this rendering. Added documentation to the ContourLabelLines command to account for these new capabilities.
  • For Degrees, Minutes and Degrees, Minutes, Seconds number formats, added an option to display N, S, E, or W suffixes with the absolute value of the latitude/longitude. Added NSEW macro/DDE command to control this setting.
  • Added a right-click menu option for point labels to copy the point label text to the Windows Clipboard. Text shortcuts in the label (e.g. $X, $Y) will be replaced with the corresponding numeric value using the default number format.
  • Bug fix: The change in version 2.2.8.1 allowing a different color for minor grid lines was ignored for polar plots if you had antialiasing turned on.
  • Bug fix: On XY plots if you used the right-click "Copy data" command, then pasted that curve into a new document and saved the document with File>Save (rather than Save As), the file was automatically saved to the same name as the original document, overwriting it.
  • Bug fix: On 2D views of random 3D points, if a triangle (formed by triangulating the input X,Y points) was only 1 pixel wide, then a dot would be drawn regardless of whether the Z value was outside the limits specified by Extents/Intervals/Size.
  • Bug fix: For saved bitmap images (BMP, GIF, JPG, etc.) with the resolution set to higher than 100 dpi (lower resolution settings are ignored), labels added with Text>X,Y|,Z| Labels might have been incorrectly cropped.

New in DPlot Viewer 2.2.8.3 (Apr 25, 2010)

  • Bug fix: Aaarrgghhh. One more fix associated with "better" handling of blank columns in CSV and other text files that started in version 2.2.8.1. If you had two or more columns and the data was preceded by a line containing one or more numbers (not necessarily associated with the data but which might have been, for example, the number of following data rows) then DPlot would initially interpret that number as part of the data, but then fail to properly read the file.
  • Bug fix: Previous versions saved the axis associations of only the first 20 curves to preference files (File>Save Preferences).

New in DPlot Viewer 2.2.8.2 (Mar 15, 2010)

  • For XY plots, removed restrictions for saving data as CSV. In previous versions all curves had to have the same number of points and identical X values. If either of those conditions were not met then CSV (as well as tab-separated values) was not given as a "Save as type:" option. In this release, if one or more curves has a different number of points or one or more different X values, you can save as CSV provided that all curves are sorted in increasing X order. If a curve does not have a given X, a blank entry is written to the file (two successive commas or two successive tabs). These will show as blank cells when imported into Excel.
  • Added 14 sieve size options for Grain Size Distribution plots, for ASTM sieves only. These sizes will primarily be useful for those involved in mining operations. For programmers, modified the GrainSizeFlags command to handle this new ability.
  • Added Datataker DBD file import plugin to the distribution.
  • Bug fix: For 3D surface plots, "Specify extents" to clip values outside specified Z limits did not work well with custom contour levels.
  • Bug fix: The Excel Add-In XYYY command took the correct step of shifting curve legends (from column headings) in the case of completely blank columns, but it started the shift one column too soon.
  • Bug fix: For 2D views of 3D surface plots, the legend might have overlapped title lines and/or the X axis label, particularly for narrow plots (taller than wider).
  • Bug fix: When saving CSV files for XY plots, if a column heading was blank then DPlot wrote nothing to the file (other than the trailing separator). This caused problems with version 2.2.8.1's new features improving support for blank data entries, such that DPlot might not have figured out in which line the data started. In this release blank column headings are written to CSV files as two successive quotation marks.

New in DPlot Viewer 2.2.8.1 (Mar 15, 2010)

  • Added a "Expand constants in legend" checkbox to the Y=f(X) and similar dialogs. If checked, constants (A,B,C,etc.) used in equations will be replaced with their corresponding numeric values in the legend (title in the case of 3D surfaces).
  • For surface plots from randomly-spaced data, DPlot does a better job of selecting which point the mouse is hovering over before displaying a popup note with that point's coordinates.
  • Improved handling of headings in saved CSV files for XY plots. In previous versions if there was only one curve, the heading was set to the Y axis label (which might have been blank) regardless of whether the curve had a legend entry or not. In this version, when only one curve is present then (as before) the Y axis label is used as the heading; if the Y axis label is blank then the corresponding legend entry is used. Similarly, if the X axis number format is dates and/or times and the X axis label is blank then DPlot makes a number-format related decision about an appropriate label: "Date", "Date/Time", or "Time".
  • Right-clicking along the Y axis on an XY plot in previous versions allowed you to set the upper/lower limits of the Y scale, but only for the primary Y scale regardless of which side of the plot you clicked on. In this version if you are using two independent Y axes and click on the right side, you are given the option of changing the extents of the right Y axis. Note that this may not necessarily lead to the expected results: DPlot will always try to find a reasonable tick mark interval such that each Y axis has the same number of intervals.
  • You can now set the color of minor grid lines on XY plots, independent of the major grid color.
  • For 3D wireframe plots, if both Borders and Grid are unchecked under Draw on the "Contour Options" dialog, then element borders will be drawn. In previous versions the default was grid lines, but those lines are often too sparse to give the surface much definition. If you are plotting more than a several hundred thousand points, though, this new behavior might result in a plot that is mostly black (or whatever the border color is). In that case be sure to check Grid and uncheck Borders on the Contour Options dialog.
  • Bug fix: DPlot did a poor job of handling CSV files with an abundance of blank entries, particularly if the last column in the first data line was blank. In many cases DPlot would get confused about which line the data started in, and/or might have reported that it could not find a pattern of data columns int the file.
  • Bug fix: The "Label this point" feature of Edit Mode for XY plots did not pick up the label unless the label text control was given the focus (and subsequently lost the focus, either by tabbing away or clicking on another control). The was generally a problem for the second and subsequent labels added with this feature, which set the default label to the previously-specified label text (so if you were happy with that default label, there was no reason to give the text control the focus).
  • Bug fix: The formatting buttons on the Legend dialog for XY plots did not always work on the first attempt, particularly when this dialog was opened by double-clicking on the legend.
  • Bug fix: The LAS well log file import plugin incorrectly interpreted files containing data lines exactly 256 characters long, or comment lines longer than 256 characters. There was also a roundoff error in determining the expected number of data lines for some combinations of START, STOP, and STEP values that might have led to an erroneous error message.
  • Bug fix: Axis labels/titles might have been drawn on the wrong side of a 3D view of 3D/4D data if negative scale factors on the X or Y axis were used.
  • Bug fix: Date and Time number format displayed pre-1900 dates as "########", while Calendar Date format worked fine. The problem was due to DPlot originally being limited with dates in the same way that Excel is (Jan 1, 1900 through Dec 31, 2078). DPlot has for many years worked with dates from Oct 15, 1582 through Dec 31, 9999, but the text formatting for Date and Time number format was not updated to include this capability.

New in DPlot Viewer 2.2.7.8 (Feb 22, 2010)

  • Bug fix: Some user-specified tick mark intervals did not work especially well with calendar dates, in particular tick mark intervals greater than 2 years and less than 10 resulted in a mess of early grid lines at a much smaller spacing, followed by a large gap.
  • The divisor in the Standard error about the line calculation that is one of the outputs of the Polynomial Curve Fit command has been changed from n-1 to n-. This value now matches the answer provided by Excel's LINEST function.
  • The trial version of DPlot now includes most of the file import and export plugin modules previously distributed only with the licensed version.

New in DPlot Viewer 2.2.7.7 (Feb 22, 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.

New in DPlot Viewer 2.2.7.6 (Dec 6, 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.