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Revision History (Archives, 2009)

22 June, 2009
Version 2.2.6.2

• The last several releases have allowed 2 significant figures on log scales when zooming. This generally worked fine if there was only one log cycle, but tended to create labels that overlapped each other (and didn't seem to make much sense, really) when there were two or more cycles. In this release if there is more than one log cycle, DPlot rounds zoom coordinates to 1 significant figure.
   
• For 3D data and Find Volume Under Surface, the text box entries for the extents were misleading if you checked Consider entire surface and you had set the extents of the plot by zooming or with the Extents/Intervals/Size command. In that case the extents shown in the text boxes were the displayed extents, though the entire data extents would be considered in the calculation.
   
• Bug fix: With the Edit Data command and 1D plots, you might have received an erroneous "nCurve > max" error message (indicating that the current number of groups was greater than or equal to the maximum number of groups (100)).
   

17 June, 2009
Version 2.2.6.1

• By popular demand, added a quality setting for JPEG export. You will most likely find that the 4^th of the 5 settings ("qood", the previous default) is the minimum acceptable quality. The 5^th setting is lossless and so won't produce the artifacts common to JPEG files, but the file size is much larger.
   
• (Licensed version only). Improved initial guesses for the equation form Y=A(X+B)^C. Previous versions tended to blow up with data that had a negative slope. Also added the ability to specify the extents of the curve generated by the fit equation.
   
• Modified the Excel Add-In commands XYZSurface and XYZScatter to skip over blank cells: if any of the X,Y, or Z cells are empty, no point is added. Also added better error messages for finding bad numbers, rather than relying on Excel's generic "Type mismatch" errors.
   
• Bug fix: Zooming out with the mouse wheel might have caused DPlot to crash with a logarithmic scale.
   
• Bug fix: Fixed a few issues with writing %APPDATA%/DPlot/dplot.ini. In previous versions the file might have become mangled up by the macro editor.
   

2 June, 2009
Version 2.2.6.0

Very minor changes this time. Mailing list updates will not be sent. If you're a licensed user, you can get this update at the same link you received in the last update message, or with "Check for Updates" on the Help menu.

• Fixed the boundary between peridotites and pyroxenites on the new IUGS ultramafic rock classification scale for triangle plots, and made a few changes to the label placement on the mafic rock plot to give a bit more room for the Y and Z axis labels.
   
• Bug fix: Fixed a couple of minor problems with the List Peaks dialog. In particular for 3D/4D data you'd get semi-random characters in the output if you unchecked all options.
   

1 June, 2009
Version 2.2.5.9

• For triangle plots, added options to draw IUGS Mafic and Ultramafic boundaries and labels for geologists and other... rock people :-). This is a beta feature, waiting on input from all the geologists reading this. If you see something wrong, please let me know. (In particular, I'm unsure about the 50% olivine boundary between peridotites and pyroxenites shown on the ultramafic scale. This agrees with the orinal requester's examples, but not with anything I've found on the internet about the subject - every reference I've found says the boundary is at 40%. In a perfect world this update would have waited until I knew the answer, but the bug fixes shown below mandated an update.)
   
• For plots of 3D/4D data with shaded bands, roundoff error in the height of each legend entry might have resulted in the legend not being centered vertically on the plot, as intended. This was particularly noticeable with a large (>5 or so) legend label frequency.
   
• Arrows drawn from text notes (if any) are now drawn in the color specified for the note font. In previous versions the arrows were always black. This does not apply to colors specified within the note text - only to the colors specified on the Font dialog.
   
• Bug fix: An uninitialized data problem with all versions since 2.2.4.7 might have caused DPlot to crash when viewing polar charts that included a legend.
   
• Bug fix: Text notes on triangle plots with the position specified in data space were not positioned correctly.
   
• Bug fix: The Crop command on the Edit menu did not work correctly for 3D data if the plot used negative scale factors on the X or Y axes.
   

28 May, 2009
Version 2.2.5.7

• Added the ability to specify the symbol frequency for 3D/4D scatter plots, which was previously only supported for XY plots. The corresponding SymbolFrequency macro/DDE command now also works with 3D/4D scatter plots.
   
• Bug fix: In version 2.2.5.7 the new feature of turning on/off various values supplied by the List Peak Values and List Peaks within a Range commands left extra characters on the report screen.
   
• Bug fix: For 2D views of random 3D points in a surface plot and contour lines (as opposed to shaded bands), DPlot did not properly respect the Z extents set with Options>Extents/Intervals/Size: whatever contour intervals were specified, those lines were drawn.
   

23 May, 2009
Version 2.2.5.6

• The List Peak Values and List Peaks within a Range commands on the Info menu now allow you to specify what values to display. Choose from Minimum, Maximum, Mean, Standard Deviation, and (for XY plots) Standard Error. The default of course is to display all those values. This might save a bit of editing time if you typically use the output of these operations in a text note or export that information to another application.
   
• Changed the behavior of dropping files onto DPlot. When dropping a file onto an open document window, the file is appended to that document rather than opening a new document. When dropping a file outside a document window the operation is the same as in all previous versions: a new document window is opened.
   
• Bug fix: Version 2.2.5.2 introduced a new bug when interpreting blank columns in text files. A single character was erroneously interpreted as a blank cell. So if, for example, your X column was the row number, DPlot would skip over the first 9 rows of data.
   

18 May, 2009
Version 2.2.5.5

• Bug fix: Due to a recent goof, if you attempted to save a bitmap image (BMP, GIF, JPG, PNG, TIF) and specified a resolution greater than 100 dpi and used non-zero dimensions for the width and height, the plot fonts, line widths, symbol sizes, plot size, etc. were scaled up (as expected) by <resolution>/<display resolution>, but the output image dimensions were not scaled up. The resulting image was of the requested size, but only included the top left portion of the plot. It also took (depending on the resolution setting) quite a bit longer to draw than usual, because most of the plot was clipped.
   

17 May, 2009
Version 2.2.5.4

• Bug fix: The new (2.2.5.3) feature allowing you to zoom in/out on 2D plots using your mouse wheel did not pay attention to the size of the table used to store zoom extents. If you zoomed more than 10 times with the mouse wheel w/o clicking the Zoom Out button on the toolbar or using the Zoom Out menu command, DPlot would overwrite other data, leading to strange behavior and possibly a crash.
   
• Added a checkbox to the General Options menu command to disable zooming with the mouse wheel, for those who find this feature annoying and/or who frequently unintentionally scroll the mouse wheel. Programmatically this same feature is available with the GeneralOptions command.
   

14 May, 2009
Version 2.2.5.3

• You can now zoom in/out on 2D plots using your mouse wheel.
   
• Made several changes to the "Specify columns to plot" dialog boxes:
  • Modified the dialog box so that it works as expected for line lengths greater than 1024 characters. Previous versions wrapped at the 1024'th character (same as Notepad and any other application using the standard Windows edit control), making it just about impossible to tell what you were looking at.
     
  • You can now read files containing up to 256 columns, though the total limit on the number of curves is unchanged at 100. In previous versions you could not read a file containing more than 101 columns (for XY plots, 1 X plus 100 Y columns).
     
  • For XY plots the "Use these columns for Y" list now displays column headings in addition to the column index.
     
  • For XY plots the dialog box is now resizable, and if you increase/decrease the width then the "Use these columns for Y" list box is resized along with the dialog box. This is handy for long, somewhat similar column headings that are not shown in their entirety in the table headings.
     
• Added a step plot plugin for the full version. If you elect to install this plugin you'll see "Make Step Plot" on the Generate menu.
   
• Minor change to the XYYY Excel Add-In command: In previous versions the first row was used as axis labels or legend entries only if the first column, first row contained a text entry. In this version this cell may be blank, with subsequent columns in the first row containing Y labels.
   
• Bug fix: There was a roundoff problem with small amplitudes on XY plots with "Specify interval". For example if you set the interval to 2.E-11 and the Y extents to 0 to 2.E-10, DPlot would erroneously determine that the high extent was less than the low extent plus some multiple (in this case 10) of the tick interval, and increase the high extent (to, in this case, 2.2E-10).
   
• Bug fix: A change in version 2.2.4.6 (not erasing the background of a document window when the plot was updated, thereby making 3D animations much smoother) might have given the appearance that DPlot had crashed, when it was actually operating just fine (though with an inappropriate background). You might have run into this when, for example, creating a plot from scratch with the Edit Data command and hitting Cancel rather than OK. You'd be left with a picture of the Edit Data dialog and a depressed Cancel button. The plot in this case was not redrawn, since there was nothing to draw.
   

9 May, 2009
Version 2.2.5.1

• Bug fix: A fairly recent change adding support for European date formats by default (d/m/y vs. m/d/y) inadvertently did not allow a year value = 0 (which you'd get with 2 digit years for the year 2000). If attempting to read one of these files DPlot would not present an error message, but neither would it produce a plot.
   

5 May, 2009
Version 2.2.5.0

• Bug fix: The new feature of allowing shaded bands and contour lines in a 2D view of a surface plot required 1 new GDI object that was not properly destroyed after painting the plot. In general this bug would only be an issue for developers driving DPlot from another application when that app might produce many hundreds of 2D surface plots in any one session.
   
• Reset the expiration date check for the trial version. If you've previously used the trial you'll be able to use this version for 30 days.
   

4 May, 2009
Version 2.2.4.9

• Bug fix: One more time. The fix for zooming in on logarithmic scales only worked correctly for values greater than 1.0.
   

3 May, 2009
Version 2.2.4.8

• Bug fix: There were two problems associated with version 2.2.4.7's allowing two significant figures when zooming in on logarithmic scales: 1) Roundoff errors might have resulted in the low extent being equal to the high extent, which resulted in a division by 0 error and subsequent crash. 2) DPlot did a poor job of finding the space required on the left side of a plot for the Y axis values after zooming. With the default extents (use as much of the display as possible) this might have resulted in numbers being clipped at the left edge of the screen (and the right edge if multiple axes were used).
   

1 May, 2009
Version 2.2.4.7

• Added a blog. This will for the most part be used to echo support e-mail questions that seem interesting to me and/or that seem to come up frequently.
   
• Added Both lines and shades option for 3D/4D surface plots drawn in 2D. If selected, black lines are drawn at the boundaries between shaded bands. These lines are optionally labeled in the same way that "Contour lines" plots are.
   
• For 3D points on a rectangular grid drawn in 2D, amended the interpolation scheme for "Shaded bands". This was done to accommodate the above "Both lines and shades" option. In previous versions shaded bands used a bilinear interpolation scheme, while contour lines broke each grid rectangle up into 4 planar triangles with the center point being the average of the 4 corners. The bilinear method generally produced smoother-looking contours for sparse data, but that smoothness wasn't based on any insight into the data and so probably wasn't justified. In any case the bands did not match up with contour lines; in this version they do.
   
• Added a "Minor line width" option for 2D surface plots. You can set the interval for "major" lines using the "Major lines every" control. As before, labels will be drawn on lines at this interval if the "Label every major line" box is checked.
   
• Added "Preserve Scale" option to the Contour Options and Scatter Plot Options dialog. This setting is equivalent to the Preserve3DScaleFactor macro/DDE command, and in this context is only meaningful if after closing this dialog you use the CTRL+arrow keys keyboard shortcuts to spin the plot. If checked, then the next time this plot is drawn the scale factor used to force the plot into the specified extents (or the available document area if extents are not specified with Extents/Intervals/Size) will be used on all subsequent renderings when spinning the plot around using the keyboard shortcuts. This option is primarily useful for smooth animations; if this option is not used then the plot size will tend to increase/decrease and possibly shift left, right, up, or down as you spin it around using the keyboard shortcuts. Note that this may mean that portions of the plot will be clipped when using this option. For best results first select viewing angles that will make the plot take up the largest portion of screen space - typically this will be at azimuths of 45, 135, 225, or 315 degrees.
   
• Added right-click menu items for 3D surface plots in a 3D view. You can now quickly switch to a surface plot, wireframe plot, and for 3D points on a rectangular grid to a waterfall plot or bar chart. In practice this feature is mostly useful for switching to a wireframe plot before making changes to the viewpoint using the CTRL+arrow keys shortcuts.
   
• You can now control the size of the symbols used in surface plots when "Data points" is checked on the Contour Options dialog. Programmatically the size may be set with [SymbolSize(1,<size in 1000'ths of inches>].
   
• Amended the Color macro/DDE command to include support for setting the color of border lines used on 3D/4D surface plots.
   
• On 2D views, all plot types, if you used the Print Caption option on the Text menu to display the plot filename in the lower right corner of the plot, that caption might have overlapped the numbers along the X axis.
   
• For logarithmic scales on XY plots, DPlot would not allow you to zoom in to extents that were not 5 or 10 times some power of 10. In this release you can zoom in to extents with 2 significant figures.
   
• Bug fix: DPlot did not correctly parse clipboard text with a date in the first column, time in the second column. In this version pasting this data from the clipboard behaves the same way that reading that data from a file would: the date and time are combined to form the X values.
   
• Bug fix: If you clicked OK on the Label Points dialog for 3D data and there were no labels, DPlot crashed.
   
• Bug fix: If you used the Specify Extents option on the Extents/Intervals/Size command with a logarithmic scale, for some values DPlot might have displayed the wrong value due to a small roundoff error. For example 1E-9 might have been displayed as 1.01E-9.
   
• Bug fix: If you used a single custom contour level of 0 with surface plots and re-opened the Contour Levels dialog, DPlot crashed with a division by 0 error.
   
• Bug fix: In previous versions DPlot automatically cropped metafiles and enhanced metafiles, eliminating excess white space. In most cases of course this was a good thing. But when driving DPlot from another program, retrieving a metafile from DPlot and setting that picture to be the background of a picture frame in that application, the resulting plot might not have had the expected aspect ratio. This was particularly noticeable with polar plots, which might not have been circular. In this release you (or rather your program) will get the metafile it asks for, including white space.
  Somewhat related: Amended the VB btest4 and C ctest4 demo programs distributed with DPlot Jr to request a metafile size more in synch with the picture frame dimensions. Previous versions forced the width to 5 inches and the height was set proportional to the width, according to the relative frame dimensions. This worked fine for frames with an aspect ratio smaller than w/h = 5/3. The only trouble was that DPlot forces both the width and height to be at least 3 inches, so wide frames would end up producing distorted plots.
   

15 April, 2009
Version 2.2.4.6

• 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.
   

8 April, 2009
Version 2.2.4.2

• Bug fix: The legend entries for median-based 1D box-and-whisker plots were fouled up starting with version 2.2.3.5.
   
• Bug fix: Axis labels were drawn in the incorrect location on 3D views with an elevation of 0 degrees.
   
• Beta feature: Not documented anywhere but here (yet): For 3D views you can use Ctrl + ←, →, ↑, ↓ keys to increment/decrement the azimuth/elevation by 1 degree. This feature of course works best with simple plots: a few thousand points or less, antialiasing turned off, no lighting for surface plots.
   

7 April, 2009
Version 2.2.4.1

• Bug fix: In the Symbols dialog for 3D scatter plots, if you selected the new cube symbol introduced with version 2.2.4 and then switched between data sets in the "Data set" list, the selected symbol list was not updated correctly.
   
• Bug fix: The new functionality of the Preserve3DScaleFactor command (namely, keeping the axis of rotation at a fixed spot on the plot) introduced with version 2.2.4 only worked with 3D bar charts. Whoops! Also related to Preserve3DScaleFactor, if your symbols in a 3D/4D scatter plot used "Symbol size in Z units" and you used a perspective projection, you might have noticed that the symbols were not drawn with the same size in all orientations. This was particularly noticeable in animations using Wingding symbols. The problem was due to the fixed location in the plot that was used to obtain a scale factor for the symbols. (Before perspective projection was added, the location where that measurement was taken was irrelevant because any distance in the Z direction was the same everywhere.)
   
• Bug fix: When saving 3D/4D scatter plots to a CSV file or tab-separated columns text file, DPlot wrote the maximum number of data points from all sets for each set. Generally this resulted in appending 0,0,0 triplets to one or more sets.
   
• Bug fix: For 3D views of 3D/4D plots, the X and/or Y axis labels were drawn in the incorrect locations for an elevation angle of 0 degrees.
   

5 April, 2009
Version 2.2.4.0

• Added full functionality for 3D bar charts. Bar charts may now be selected with the Contour Options command (for 3D views of Z values on a rectangular grid). You may also set the relative widths of bars with that command.
   
• Slightly altered the 3D projection method used by DPlot. In previous versions it was not possible to reliably back out a viewpoint from the azimuth and elevation when perspective projection was used. This wasn't a serious weakness with surface plots but led to incorrect depth-sorting problems with 3D bar charts.
   
• Added a cube symbol for 3D scatter plots. Unlike other symbols the cube is truly 3D, and is drawn with respect to your perspective settings. Programmatically that symbol type may be selected with [SymbolType(curve,389)]. This symbol will only be used if Symbol sizes in Z units is checked on the Symbol styles dialog box. That feature may also be set with the SymbolSizeUnits macro/DDE command.
   
• Added droplines for 3D scatter plots. Lines may be in the symbol color or black, and you have control over the line width. Amended the ScatterPlotLines macro/DDE command to take this new feature into account.
   
• Changed the behavior of the Preserve3DScaleFactor command. This command has always been useful for producing sequences of bitmap images to import into movie-making applications like Windows Movie Maker. But in previous versions no attempt was made at fixing the location of the center of the graph, so frames tended to jump around the screen a bit during animations. In this release Preserve3DScaleFactor preserves the scaling and the extents of the current frame and re-uses those values in all subsequent frames, so that the graph's center of rotation will be in the same place in all frames.

  Also added a 0 parameter to Preserve3DScaleFactor to turn this feature off.

  
   
• For 3D/4D scatter plots, added an option to draw droplines from each symbol to the base XY plane.
   
• List Peaks and List Peaks within a Range previously included data points outside the range specified with the Amplitude Limits command. This version ignores those points.
   
• Bug fix: For 3D scatter plots if the symbol size was set to 0 (use a default size) and you saved the graph to a high-resolution image format, the symbols were oversized (roughly by a factor of resolution/100).
   
• Bug fix: Selecting points by clicking on the plot with the Distance from command did not work well with 3D views if a perspective projection was used.
   

28 Mar, 2009
Version 2.2.3.8

• Bug fix: Version 2.2.3.7 would not properly read point label information saved to DPlot files with version 2.0.6.3 or older.
   

26 Mar, 2009
Version 2.2.3.7

• Changed how the perspective value is defined for 3D views. In previous versions the perspective value was (loosely) the distance from the viewpoint to the center of the box bounding the plot. Although this worked fine, determining a good value for one plot had no relevance to other plots with different extents. In this release the perspective value is a ratio of one-half the box diagonal. A value of 1, then (the minimum) produces a very distorted view with the viewpoint on the smallest imaginary sphere that surrounds the plot. Most surfaces will look best with a perspective value of 2 or more. This change requires ignoring perspective values saved to DPlot files with version 2.2.3.4. Programmers who used the perspective setting with a ContourView command will need to make changes to their code.
   
• Beta feature: Added 3D bar charts. This feature is currently only available via macro command and will likely be added to the user interface in the next release. 3D bar charts, like waterfall plots, are limited to rectangular grids of Z values (does not work with random 3D points, in other words). This limitation is not likely to change. The following sequence of macro commands will produce a 3D bar chart:
  3D Bar Chart
  
  

  Contour3D(1)              ' Turn 3D view on
  ContourMethod(4)          ' Bar chart
  ContourBarWidth(0.5,0.5)  ' Sets bar widths relative to X and Y interval
  '                           (default=1)
  

  If you open the Contour Options dialog and click OK or Apply, the plot will revert to a surface plot and you will need to run the macro again to restore the bar chart. This will of course change once this feature becomes "official". Comments and suggestions are of course welcome.
   
• Bug fix: An uninitialized data problem related to version 2.2.3.4's addition of perspective projections might have caused DPlot to crash when controlled by another application. This problem affected 3D views of 3D/4D surface plots.
   

22 Mar, 2009
Version 2.2.3.5

• Bug fix: Version 2.2.3.4 contained a bug that might have resulted in an ordinary number being interpreted as a date.
   
• Minor changes to the Contour Options and Scatter Plot Options dialogs pertaining to new perspective projection feature.
   

20 Mar, 2009
Version 2.2.3.4

• Added perspective projection capabilities to all 3D views. Programmers see the updated ContourView command.
   
• Added "Copy Data" and "Edit Legend" menu items to the right-click menu when clicking on a curve in an XY plot. Copy Data copies the data for the selected curve to the Clipboard as tab-separated columns; Edit Legend opens the Legend/Labels dialog with the corresponding curve selected.
   
• The Polynomial Curve Fit command generated a curve with arbitrary line and symbol types. In this version the newly-generated curve will use solid line segments and no symbols.
   
• Bug fix: Starting with version 2.2.2.7, if a bitmap was requested with width or height less than 300 pixels, then DPlot multiplies those values by whatever power of 2 achieves a width and height > 300, then resizes the bitmap by that same scale factor. This all works well, but the associated DPLOT_PLOTMETRICS values obtained with DPlot_GetBitmapEx were those for the larger bitmap, not the bitmap returned. This made it impossible to scale mouse position to plot space (unless, of course, your program knew the scale factor used by DPlot).
   
• Bug fix: For random 3D points from a file, DPlot always sorted the points in X, then Y, then Z order. This was done to make the triangulation routine more efficient for surface plots, but the sorting was also done for scatter plots. There is no logical reason to do this for scatter plots. And if you chose to draw line segments between data points, the lines would of course not be drawn between the points you expected.
   
• Bug fix: Bubble plot points were clipped against the extents of the primary Y axis, even if Multiple Axes were used and the graph was associated with the second Y axis.
   
• Bug fix: If Degrees, Minutes, Seconds or Degrees, Minutes number format was used, DPlot did a poor job of handling negative values between 0 and -1 degree, both on input and output.
   

13 Mar, 2009
Version 2.2.3.3

• Better initial estimates for the curve fit coefficients in the More Curve Fits plugin with the tanh equation form.
   
• Added SetDecimalSymbol command and DecimalSymbol request item.
   
• Bug fix: A roundoff error might have resulted in the upper X extent shifting right every time a plot was redrawn if Calendar Date number formatting was used.
   

10 Mar, 2009
Version 2.2.3.2

• Bug fix: Version 2.2.3.1 might have failed to read in point label information saved to a DPlot file with a much older version of DPlot.
   
• Bug fix: On the Point Labels dialog, if you were using "Date and Time" number formatting for the X axis but the date format was set to "<none>", then the X label position was displayed as a time only. Fine so far, but when scrolling through the list of labels or clicking OK, DPlot attempted to read a date and time from that text box, found only a time, and set the date to 0 (Dec 31, 1899). In this version the date will be displayed whether "<none>" is used for the date format or not. Thanks Jon Canale for pointing out the problem.
   
• Bug fix: If you used Reference lines with the "Label" set to draw the reference line label in the plot legend, the label might have been replaced by the previous legend entry. Thanks to Richard Swaim for pointing out the problem.
   

9 Mar, 2009
Version 2.2.3.1

• Bug fix: A change in version 2.2.3 broke the ability to read text notations from saved DPlot files, generally resulting in an error related to "keyword notev3".
   
• Bug fix: The added support for alternate decimal symbols in 2.2.3 wasn't complete and in one case was badly implemented. For Y=f(X) the oldest rather than the newest equation was selected. In all other functions that stored previously-used equations, the equation was not rewritten using the new rules related to a comma decimal symbol. So you might have encountered a syntax error on an equation that previously worked as expected.
   
• Bug fix: All of the changes to point labels in version 2.2.3 resulted in a couple of new bugs. The label location (if expressed in plot coordinates rather than an offset) was rounded to the nearest integer. And if you had multiple labels on a plot, scrolling through the list of labels did not properly update the other fields on the dialog. So if you had 100 labels you might have ended up with 100 identical labels just by scrolling through the list.
   

8 Mar, 2009
Version 2.2.3.0

• Internationalization with respect to numbers: Added a "Decimal symbol" entry to the General Options dialog. The first time you run this version of DPlot this entry defaults to the symbol set with the Windows Control Panel. If a comma is used as the decimal symbol, then lists of numbers (e.g. arguments to functions using Y=f(X) and similar routines) must be separated by semicolons. This setting is used for all dialog box text box inputs and for reading tab-separated columns of text, either from file or from the Clipboard. It is not used when copying data to the Clipboard or when saving text files. Macros and calls to DPlot_Command still expect the standard '.' as a decimal point and arguments separated by commas, and this is not likely to change.
   
• The Distance from... command on the Info menu now works with 3D and 4D surface and scatter plots, in both 2D and 3D views. The cursor will always be snapped to the closest data point. Note that in 3D views, the cursor may snap to a point that is hidden.
   
• For bubble plots and vector plots, you may now use the shortcut $Z to use the bubble/vector magnitude as the label text for Point Labels.
   
• Amended Excel Add-In OneD function such that data sets may be arranged in columns (the default) or rows. For the OneD function to pick up correctly on the latter, the first column must contain at least one non-empty non-numeric label beyond the first row.
   
• The Excel Add-In generally handled blank cells as expected, but not if the cell contained a formula that resulted in the contents of the cell being set to an empty text string (""). In that case the Add-In function generally reported an error.
   
• Added optional "options" string to the FileAppend macro/DDE command, giving it the same functionality as the FileOpen command for file import plugins.
   
• Increased the maximum number of fill areas per plot from 20 to 100, mostly to accomodate some things being worked on for US maps.
   
• Point labels:
  • The "Copy" and "Label All" buttons on the Point Labels dialog box now work much better with respect to the X and Y label offsets for all labels if "Specified as offset in inches" is selected. In previous versions all labels were given a default offset from the corresponding data point.
     
  • Added alignment settings for point labels. In previous versions the location always specified the location of the left middle of the rectangle surrounding the label. This made it near impossible to align multiple labels of varying lengths if you wanted the labels to the left side (for example) of the referenced points.
     
  • Added a "Label All" button to the Point Labels dialog box for 3D plots, with functionality similar to that found on the 2D version of that dialog box. (Note that it is trivially easy to run out of memory using this feature; each label currently requires 136 bytes).
     
  • Added the ability to use equations in point labels that included the $X, $Y, or $Z shortcuts. (In previous versions you could do one or the other, but not both.) This will mostly be useful for formatting the label differently than the numbers on the corresponding axis. For example, to display Y values rounded to 2 decimal places: "$=(ROUND($Y,2))"
     
  • The "Label All" button on the Point Labels dialog box previously labeled all curves, including those not drawn because they were in use as the source for error bar, bubble plot, or vector plot magnitudes or vector plot angles. This version will only add labels to curves that are drawn.
     
• Bug fix: Version 2.2.2.9 allowed line breaks in legend entries for XY plots. This worked fine for a single line break (2 lines), but caused a crash with multiple line breaks in a single legend entry. Also, line breaks in legend strings passed to DPlot via DDE, e.g. from the Excel Add-In, were replaced by spaces.
   
• Bug fix: Opening a file supported by a DPlot file import plugin on the command line or with Explorer's "Open With..." feature did not work properly because the available plugin modules had not been initialized yet. (This bug did not effect dragging a file onto an open DPlot window or opening it with the Open command on the File menu.) In some cases this bug might have resulted in DPlot treating the file as a simple text file.
   

21 Feb, 2009
Version 2.2.2.9

• DPlot Jr now supports file export plugins. It is distributed with image export plugins for BMP, GIF, JPG, PNG, and TIF formats.
   
• The legend in XY plots may now contain line breaks (using the character sequence \n) in the same way that the title lines and axis labels do.
   
• Version 2.2.2.7 added the ability to specify the interval between generated points resulting from Y=f(X) and Y=f(X,Y1,Y2,...) using number-format specific units. For example, if the X axis used a calendar date, then you were given the option of selecting the interval in years, months, days, hours, minutes, seconds, or milliseconds. However, "years" was rounded to 365 days and "months" to 30 days, so, for example, if the from X value was Jan 1, 2009 and dX was set to 1 month, you'd get points at X=1/1/09, 1/31/09, 3/2/09, etc. In this version years and months are evaluated as you'd expect.
   
• Added a "Restore defaults" button to the Colors dialog for XY plots.
   
• Added an option to the Find Volume Under Surface command for 3D plots to perform the calculation on a subset of the surface by specifying the X and Y extents.
   
• DPlot will now correctly handle semicolons as column separators in text files, in addition to commas, tabs, and spaces.
   
• Changed the way that 2-digit years in text files were interpreted. In previous versions year values less than 10 were assumed to be 21^st century dates; otherwise the 20^th century was assumed. In this release 2-digit years less than 90 are assumed to be 21^st century dates. If DPlot makes the wrong assumption, you can easily adjust the date values with Edit>Operate on X and (to switch from the 20^th to the 21^st century) X=X+DATE(2000,1,1)-DATE(1900,1,1)
   
• Licensed version only: Added the equation forms y=A*(cosh,sinh, or tanh)(B*X+C)+D to the "More Curve Fits" plugin.
   
• Added |DPLOTDRIVE| and |DPLOTPATH| shortcuts to the Directory, FileOpen, and FileSaveAs macro/DDE commands. When used, these shortcuts are replaced with the drive or folder, respectively, where DPlot is installed. This may be particularly useful when running DPlot from a removable drive.
   
• Bug fix: Fixed an obscure problem with the ManualScale command. If DPlot was hidden when this command was used and one or more parameters were omitted (indicating that the previous values should be retained), the plot extents were not updated correctly and the resulting bitmap or metafile used the incorrect extents.
   
• Bug fix: When using the Smooth command on the Edit menu, if "Operate on ALL points" was unchecked, DPlot did not honor the "to X=" value and, depending on space allocated for the X and Y arrays, might have crashed.
   
• Bug fix: When reading text files, if a space-separated date and time were found in the first column, then DPlot erroneously combined the column headings for the first two columns into the X axis label, unless those headings were surrounded by "quotation marks".
   
• Bug fix: In the last several releases the ColumnsAre macro/DDE command has been broken. Several parameters were reset to 0 after the ColumnsAre command and before reading a file.
   
• Bug fix: Changes to the plot background color were not saved to undo files, and consequently not undone with Edit>Undo.
   

1 Feb, 2009
Version 2.2.2.7

• Amended DPlot_AddData function to improve performance in real-time applications, particularly those written in .NET applications and/or run on Windows Vista. Developers please note: this change requires a change to your programs. You will eventually need to call the new DPlot_Disconnect function. See the note in the DPlot_AddData topic for more information.
   
• For similar reasons, added [DeferMinMaxCheck(state)] command. If state is non-zero, then minimum values, maximum values, mean, standard deviation and similar parameters are not recalculated after every call to DPlot_AddData (as they have been in all previous versions). This is particularly useful for real-time applications, particularly after plotting many thousands of points. The downside to using this feature is that text entries using any of the text placeholder features will not be updated until a [DeferMinMaxCheck(0)] command is issued.
   
• The Y=f(X,Y1,Y2,...) command now allows you to specify the interval in X in number-format-specific units, as the Y=f(X) command has done for a while. For example if the X axis is shown as calendar dates, dX may be specified in years, months, days, hours, minute, seconds, or milliseconds.
   
• Working with an existing plot, the Y=f(X) and Y=f(X,Y1,Y2,...) commands allow you to click on the plot to set the from X and to X values.
   
• Double-clicking on a specific legend entry brings up the Legend dialog box, sets the Curve No. entry to the index of the associated curve, and gives the legend text box the input focus. In previous versions the same action simply opened the Legend dialog box with the Curve No. set to 1.
   
• Bug fix: If you saved a DPlot file using a logarithmic scale on either the X or Y axis and one or more curves were hidden, when attempting to reopen that file you'd get the erroneous error message "All X(Y) values are equal to 0 for one or more curves. Cannot use logarithmic (or N1.85 scaling (X axis only))".
   
• Bug fix: The Copy button on the Peaks box (shown as a result of the List Peaks or List Peaks in Range commands) only copied the first 1023 characters to the Clipboard, generally not enough if the plot consisted of seven or more curves if no text was selected (meaning the entire text box contents should be copied).
   
• Bug fix: If you used Operate on X or Operate on Y commands on a plot containing X,Y labels, the label X/Y value was shifted using that same operation, whether you operated on all curves or not. In this release, X/Y Labels are only shifted if all curves are selected. Also, the X/Y value shown on the X,Y Labels dialog was formatted using the number format for the X axis, regardless of which axis the label was associated with. In this release the value is formatted using the format for the appropriate axis.
   
• Bug fix: In the last several versions, if you used "Pick columns to plot" with a multiple-column text file and the X column was the last selected column, DPlot did not properly read the X column values.
   
• Bug fix: The "Specify Columns to Plot" dialog sometimes did a poor job of parsing column headings in space-delimited text files.
   
• Bug fix: When saving a bitmap image, if either (but not both) of the requested width or height was less than 100 pixels, an uninitialized data problem would set the other dimension to a nonsense value. (In all previous versions, if both the width and height were set to less than 100 pixels then DPlot overrode those values and created what was essentially a screenshot. This is changed in the following.)
   
• If the requested width or height of a bitmap image is less than 300 pixels but greater than 0, then DPlot scales the width and height up by the required ratio to make those dimensions greater than 300, and then resamples the larger bitmap to get the requested size using a bilinear resizing algorithm. (There are more sophisticated resizing filters, but the simple bilinear routine generally works best on graphs.) In previous versions if the dimensions were greater than 100 but less than 300 pixels, DPlot simply drew the bitmap at the requested size. In most cases this resulted in unattractive plots with illegible fonts. This change should be useful for users wanting thumbnail images of graphs, particularly for software developers using DPLOTLIB functions to produce bitmaps.
   

7 Jan, 2009
Version 2.2.2.5

• If you called DPLOTLIB.DLL functions with DPlot or DPlot Jr hidden, before the first time that application had been run on the target system, the application was not hidden. Subsequent runs worked correctly.
   
• Bug fix: All versions since 2.1.7.7 have used the UPX compressor on the main application and the macro editor. Unfortunately, on some versions of Windows XP there is an apparent software conflict with UPX-compressed applications that has caused strange problems for at least 1 user. Specifically, macro/DDE commands including 2-digit numbers (but weirdly not 1- or 3-digit numbers) were not interpreted correctly. At least for now, I've given up on compressing executables. This change does not increase the setup file size but obviously does increase the file size of the installed program.
   
• Bug fix: Deleting the only reference line using Options>Reference Lines caused DPlot to crash on Windows XP.
   
• Bug fix: If two or more X values were equal, attempting to switch to a bar chart caused DPlot to crash.
   
• Bug fix: In the "Bitmap to 3D" file import plugin, if the color 0 and color 255 Z values were set equal, DPlot crashed.
   
• Bug fix: The last several versions included test code to draw antialiased symbols on printed output. Unfortunately this feature worked on a very few printers, but on most printers antialiased symbols (set by checking "Antialias objects on display output" under Options>General) were drawn as a solid black box.
   

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