Re: [Gretl-devel] plotting news
On Sat, 23 Dec 2017, Sven Schreiber wrote:
Am 16.12.2017 um 01:49 schrieb Allin Cottrell:
> I've been working recently on the GUI editor for graphs/plots. Things in
> this department may have been a little flaky lately but I think they have
> now stabilized in git and snapshots. Some aspects of the layout of the
> plot-editor dialog should now be better (in particular under the "Lines"
> tab, where available) and I've fixed several bugs, one or two of which were
> potential crashers.
>
> So now would be a good time to test this stuff, if anyone is so inclined.
> The relevant code is fresh in my mind and any required fixes ought to come
> pretty quickly.
Hi,
just some random comments, not all related to any recent changes (but this is
with a Dec 18th snapshot on Windows 10):
- Two Y-axes: For the first y-axis there is an option to switch between
linear scale to log, but not for Y2. I've never needed this myself, but I
don't see any reason why this couldn't be there for Y2 as well.
OK, I'll look into that.
- Could be my own translation issue, but I don't remember leaving
it out: In
the Lines tab in the type drop-down menu only "lines/points" is translated
(to German for me), the rest is in English. Are those marked for translation?
Yes, they're marked for translation.
- Trivial placement issue: The color chooser button is placed in the
"line"
row. Perhaps better to place it in the "type" row, because even for
type==dots this is relevant and active, when the other line-related things
are inactive.
Actually not so trivial: some "lines" don't have a "type" row.
I've
thought quite a bit about where to put the color selector and so far
have not come up with anything better than the status quo.
- y-axis chooser (also in lines tab): There are naturally only two
options,
left and right; so perhaps better to replace the drop-down menu with radio
buttons, or even just a boolean tick box?
Radio buttons take up too much space and I think a single tick box
is likely to be less easily comprehensible.
- Add line: Entering in the formula field something like "2 *
myvar" (where
myvar is a workfile series) this is accepted at first (in the small dialog
window), but the hitting 'apply' in the main graph edit window then produces
an error (as expected, but see below).
Then I have two suggestions / feature requests in this area, if it's
reasonably straightforward to implement them:
- Add line: Related to the bug above; currently this is only for entering a
"deterministic" formula. It would be useful to actually be able to add more
variables here. Currently I think the official way is to start from scratch
with an expanded set of variables -- this is OK but not super-flexible from a
user's point of view.
Not at all straightforward to implement, I'm afraid. Allowing
additions, deletions or changes of any sort to the data series
represented in a plot would increase the complexity of the plot
editor by an order of magnitude.
- Language of automatic legend entries (this has been discussed
before):
People like me have the situation that they use gretl in a native language
but need English-language plots. What I mean especially is that with two
Y-axes gretl puts "(left)" and "(right)" into the legend. Only that
it uses
the translated versions, so "(links)" and "(rechts)" for me. This is
not
editable in the "legend" field for the lines because it doesn't appear
there.
The recommended workaround has been to restart gretl in English, but I wonder
if instead these automatic additions could be shown in the "legend" fields,
such that they become editable as well. I hope that description was
understandable.
Understandable, yes, but not so easy to get right. By making these
label elements automatic we can ensure they stay in sync with
choices made by the GUI editor. Otherwise, hard to know how we'd
avoid messes such as "foo (left) (links)" and such. You're better
editing that sort of thing at gnuplot script level.
Allin