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Revision History (Archives, 2004)

1 December 2004
Version 1.9.7.8

• DPlot does a better job of eliminating white space between the Y axis titles and the axis numbers for all number formats, particularly those involving superscript codes (powers of 10, for example).
   
• Gridline color is stored and retrieved correctly from preference files (File>Get/Save Preferences).
   
• If you zoom in on a 2D view of 3D data and then switch to a 3D view, the zoomed extents are now used for the 3D view. In previous versions the 3D rendering ignored the zoom values.
   
• Bug fix: Reading date/time groups in comma-separated values files was broken by a "fix" in version 1.9.7.5
   
• Bug fix: "Date and time" number formatting did not work particularly well with the Extents/Tick Marks/Size command. Code to read a date/time sequence was too restrictive and often translated the input value to 0 if the expected format was not used.
   
• Bug fix: Macro facility did not allow you to save an unformatted binary file within a ForFilesIn loop.
   

28 October 2004
Version 1.9.7.6

• Bug fix: 3D scatter plots were broken in the previous update.
   
• Legend on 3D plots is now drawn at a fixed distance from the right edge of the plot, rather than right-justified on the display, printed page, etc.
   

24 October 2004
Version 1.9.7.5

• Added the ability to embed placeholders in title lines, axis labels, legend entries, and notations for data minima, maxima, mean, and standard deviation. For example "$YMAX" in a title line will be replaced with the maximum Y value for all data sets when the plot is drawn. For more information search the Help file for 'maxima'.
   
• Another significant improvement was made to removing overlaying X,Y points from 3D data. This will be most noticeable with very large (>100,000 points) data sets.
   
• Added an option for bar charts to display percentages of the total for ALL data sets. The default is to show percentages of the total for the data set of the labelled bar.
   
• Using Edit mode or the Edit Data command on the Edit menu, dates on the X axis may be entered using M/d/yyyy format rather than as Excel serial date numbers.
   
• Added PasteLink() macro/DDE command. This is equivalent to using the Paste Special menu command with the Link box checked. Improved behavior of linked data: in previous versions if you linked data from one DPlot plot to another plot DPlot might have become temporarily confused about which plot was associated with which document window.
   
• Bug fix: DPlot sometimes failed to find the correct start line for data values in multiple-column ASCII text files if the data lines contained different numbers of leading spaces.
   

30 August 2004
Version 1.9.7.2

• Starting with version 1.8.3.3, a very inefficient routine for removing overlaying X,Y points from random 3D data was used. For several thousand points this did not result in a significant delay, but for tens of thousands of points became very noticeable. For 100,000 or more points DPlot required a lot of patience.
   
• Error bars now use the Symbol Frequency setting on the Symbol/Line Styles dialog to determine the frequency of error bars. Previous versions drew error bars at every data point.
   
• Extended last version's new feature of allowing dates to be entered as M/d/yyyy rather than Excel serial dates to several dialogs.
   
• Added a method to specify that type 11 files (3D, 3 column ASCII text) should be interpreted as 3D scatter plots rather than 3D surface plots. On the command line, use /f267 <filename> (rather than /f11 <filename>). In a macro or when included in a DPlot_Command call, use FileType(267).
   
• Bug fix: FileType macro/DDE command was often ignored. In particular DPlot was prone to determining the file type itself, and overriding the FileType command.
   
• Bug fix: Fixed a remnant of a bug addressed in the last release. If you somehow printed a document which had never been drawn to the display, typically by using the Multiple feature, DPlot crashed due to an uninitialized data problem. This error was fixed for files opened within DPlot, but was still broken for multiple files opened on the command line. The problem data is now initialized properly in all cases.
   

9 August 2004
Version 1.9.7.1

• Added an option to draw grid lines above fill patterns, curves, and/or reference lines. See Options>Symbol/Line Styles. Added corresponding GridLinesOnTop macro/DDE command.
   
• Added Degrees, Minutes and Degrees, Minutes, Seconds number formats.
   
• This version is a bit more flexible with tick mark intervals on scales that use Calendar Date or Date and Time number formatting. Previous versions fixed the tick mark interval at 1/2 month or 1 month regardless of user-specified settings on the Extents/Tick Marks/Size dialog. This version allows you to set the tick mark interval to 1/2 month, 1 month, 2 months, 6 months, or 1 year.
   
• User-specified extents on the Extents/Tick Marks/Size dialog for calendar dates are now quite a bit easier to enter. You can now use M/d/yyyy format rather than being forced to enter Excel serial dates (July 31, 2004 = 38199, for example).
   
• User-specified tick mark intervals on the Extents/Tick Marks/Size dialog now include a unit selection when the corresponding axis uses Time, Date and Time, Calendar Date, Degrees, Minutes or Degrees, Minutes, Seconds number formatting. For example you may enter a tick mark interval in seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, or years for Date and Time formatting rather than being restricted to days.
   
• Added an option for grain size distribution plots to use Udden-Wentworth size classification rather than AASHTO (American Association of State Highway Transportation Officials) scale. The Udden-Wentworth scale is typically used by geologists while the AASHTO scale is normally used in construction.
   
• For polar plots, bar charts, and grain size distribution plots added a Make defaults option on the respective Options dialogs. This saves the current option settings to the preference file DEFAULT.SET, so that these options will be in effect when new plots are created. This will be particularly useful for those producing polar plots with angles in degrees rather than radians.
   
• Added an option to the TextPointLabel macro/DDE command to specify label position as an offset in physical inches.
   
• Bug fix: In previous versions memory for the first document was not properly freed when closing that document. This resulted in DPlot consuming more and more memory as you opened and closed documents and was particularly a problem if you worked with one (and only one) open document and plots consisting of millions of data points. Thanks to Eric Gross for help in finding the problem.
   
• Bug fix: On plots containing special text formatting codes (subscripts, superscripts, color, etc.), fonts were not properly deleted on Windows 95, 98, and Me systems. This resulted in a drain on system resources and eventual program sluggishness and/or graphic problems if you ran DPlot long enough. Thanks to Scott Brilz for helping isolate the problem.
   
• Bug fix: Several features that allowed you to pick coordinates off a plot with your mouse while a dialog box was open incorrectly determined that the mouse was outside the plot (beep) if DPlot was not maximized.
   
• Bug fix: If you somehow printed a document which had never been drawn to the display (for example, opening multiple DPlot files with a single File>Open command with the document window maximized, then printing using the Multiple feature), DPlot crashed due to an uninitialized data problem. Thanks to Jürgen Metzger for help in isolating this problem.
   
• Bug fix: File import plugins sometimes failed and caused a crash when appending data to existing plots and/or when reading multiple files.
   

17 July 2004
Version 1.9.7

• Licensed version only: Added PNG (Portable Network Graphics), TIFF (Tagged Image File Format) and JPEG file export plugins. These plugins, as well as a replacement plugin for BMP files, all use the FreeImage DLL, a very nicely done toolkit for developers interested in supporting a variety of image formats.
   
• Licensed version only: Added file import plugins for several digital recorders: Tektronix .WFM files, Gould Instrument Systems .DAT files, and Hi-Techniques Win600 .DAT files. These plugins are available to licensed users as an installation option.
   
• Help features have been improved. In particular: Context-sensitive help for all dialog boxes has been brought up to date. Pressing F1 in all but the simplest dialogs brings up the applicable Help topic. Status bar descriptions of menu commands and tool buttons has been brought up to date. The How do I create the example plots? section of the Help file includes additional examples and the existing examples have been improved.
   
• Function parser (used by Y=f(X), etc.) does a better job of syntax checking, particularly with regard to parentheses, and gives more meaningful error messages when an error is found. For example previous versions would accept Y=5(x+4) and produce Y=0. This version balks with "Syntax error: missing operator before open parenthesis."
   
• Modified the Paste code so that it is a bit smarter about interpreting column headings. In previous versions if any heading contained a space or comma then it had to be surrounded by "quotation marks" to be interpreted correctly. This version checks the heading line for tab characters, and if found assumes that column headings are delimited by tabs. So tab-separated column headings may contain spaces and/or commas without being surrounded by quotation marks. See the Help file "How do I create the example plots" for EX02.GRF for an example of this improved feature.
   
• The Number Formats dialog now includes predefined date and time formats (identical to Control Panel's predefined formats) that make selecting an appropriate format a bit easier. Thanks to Aaron Weiner for the suggestion.
   
• Specify extents now works consistently on all 3D plots. In this release, contour lines that fall outside user-specified Z extents are not drawn. This might be useful if you want plots of several slices of your data that all use the same contour coloring scheme without being forced to go to the trouble of redefining colors for each slice.
   
• The new (1.9.6.7) Find volume under surface command has been amended to show volume above and below the reference plane along with the sum and difference of those two volumes. Previous version displayed only the difference.
   
• Generate mesh command now works with Z values on a rectangular grid as well as randomly-spaced points.
   
• Added Label 0 degrees option for polar plots. By default, 0 degrees is not labelled and the maximum radius is labelled.
   
• Improved the appearance of polar plots a bit. Previous versions tended to show small gaps in the circular grid lines if a thick pen was used.
   
• For image file export plugins (e.g. "BMP Picture", "JPEG Picture"), DPlot will now prompt you for the desired image dimensions. Previous versions always used the current dimensions of the plot window. You may leave the width and/or height fields blank to use the window dimensions. Added macro/DDE command SetPluginImageDims to specify these dimensions before using a FileSaveAs command.
   
• The number of available macro shortcut keys has been roughly doubled. Also the macro editor now properly takes into account the presence of the Windows taskbar. Previous versions extended the total height of the screen.
   
• The "Number of symbols used" entry on the Legend dialog may now be set to 0.
   
• Added Distance from command on the Info menu. This allows you to click and drag to find the distance between two points on an XY plot.
   
• Cosmetic changes made to the toolbar. Also provided an XP-like » button to display a dropdown menu for tools that do not fit in the window.
   
• Directory macro command is now more consistent and works correctly with FileSaveAs commands. This command is also no longer restricted to use inside a macro; it may be used in a DPlot_Command call using DPLOTLIB.DLL.
   
• File>Save As... command now skips the File Format dialog and uses the more standard Save dialog in which you can select the file format using the "Save as type" control. All Open and Save dialogs now have a more consistent appearance, are resizable (on Windows 2000 and XP) and display the standard "places" bar on Windows 2000 and XP.
   
• TickInterval macro/DDE command has been amended to allow the angular tick mark interval for polar plots to be specified in degrees rather than the default radians.
   
• Bug fix: Crosshairs tended to leave bits and pieces behind near the edges of document windows.
   
• Bug fix: The Delete triangles command for contour plots gave the perception that DPlot had locked up if you switched to another task and back to DPlot. The command might also have been confusing to users who had hidden DPlot's status bar, since the only instructions appeared there. This version uses a dialog box instead, and restores DPlot correctly if/when you switch tasks.
   
• Bug fix: List Peaks in Box was prone to producing nonsense answers unless you moved the mouse slightly before dragging.
   
• Bug fix: Text boxes that expect floating point numbers for input prevented you from using Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V, and Ctrl+X to copy, paste, and cut, respectively.
   
• Bug fix: The color key for 3D scatter plots was not displayed unless a legend was also displayed, regardless of whether Draw Color Key was checked.
   
• Bug fix: "Symbol sizes in Z units" did not work well for 3D scatter plots.
   
• Bug fix: Y=Poly(Y) command (applies a polynomial transformation to a curve) was broken.
   
• Bug fix: It was possible to crash DPlot by specifying a nonsense angular tick mark interval (e.g. > 360 degrees) for polar plots.
   
• Added DPlot_ZFromXY function to DPLOTLIB. This function allows you to get an interpolated Z value from a surface plot, given X and Y. See ctest2 C demo and/or btest2 VB demo in the DPLOTLIB and/or DPlot Jr distributions.
   

27 June 2004
Version 1.9.6.7

• FileSaveAs macro/DDE command may now use relative paths for the output filename. Paths will always be relative to the path where dplot.exe (or dplotjr.exe) is installed.
   
• Added a command line option to specify which columns to read from a multiple-column ASCII file for XY plots. See "Command line options" in the Help file.
   
• Added Find volume under surface command to the Generate menu for 3D surface plots.
   
• Added methods for retrieving the maximum number of curves and maximum number of points per curve for a given document. This feature is available via the DPlot_Request function of DPLOTLIB, a LinkRequest in Visual Basic, and/or a XTYP_REQUEST DDE transaction in any other language. Request items are "MaxCurves" and "MaxPoints"
   
• Bug fix: A couple of problems with polar plots have been fixed. Using "Specify Extents" to clip the minimum amplitudes on a polar plot usually resulted in one extra spurious line segment. And "Specify Extents" caused all points with negative angles to be clipped.
   
• DPLOTLIB distribution (also included with DPlot Jr) now includes functioning Visual Basic .NET example programs with source code.
   

20 June 2004

The Excel Add-In had an arbitrary limit of 20 curves. Attempting to send more than 20 data sets to DPlot via the Add-In resulted in a "subscript out of range" error. This update has the same limit as DPlot itself: 100 curves. If you have already downloaded DPlot or DPlot Jr 1.9.6.6 then you can download the much smaller Add-In setup program to correct the problem: https://www.dplot.com/excel/addinstall.exe. Close Excel before running the installation.
 

20 June 2004
Version 1.9.6.6

• Bug fix: Programmatically it was possible to fool DPlot into attempting to save a metafile and/or copy a metafile to the clipboard with 3D contour plots using shaded color bands. Metafiles are extremely inefficient with these types of plot (think hundreds of megabytes), so that feature has always been disabled for those plots.
   
• Bug fix: One more problem associated with using "Specify Extents" to clip a 3D plot in the Z direction has been fixed. With 3D points on a rectangular grid, if the actual data extents were several orders of magnitude larger than the specified extents then the plot would take a very long time to draw.
   

18 June 2004
Version 1.9.6.5

• Added "(Hidden)" suffixes for hidden curves in most of the "Select a curve" list boxes to help avoid a bit of confusion.
   
• The "Always auto-adjust scale factors on 3D plots" feature now preserves the sign of previous scale factors when the data is amended and/or a link source is updated. In other words if a scale factor was previously negative, the new scale factor will also be negative when it is recalculated after a change to the data.
   
• Added ContourLegendFrequency macro/DDE command.
   
• 2D contour plots drawn with shaded bands (rather than contour lines) will now take the Z extents specified with Extents/Tick Marks/Size into account. Areas outside the specified extents are not drawn.
   
• Line widths, symbol sizes, and other plot attributes are now scaled to give the same appearance regardless of plot size. For example, symbols on a tiled window will have roughly the same relative size as symbols on the same plot in a maximized window. In previous versions this scaling was done inconsistently.
   
• Polar plots may now include negative angles.
   
• Bug fix: Zoom did not work properly on 2D plots of 3D data when negative scale factors were used for X and/or Y. (Negative scale factors can be used to reverse the normal drawing direction. For example, you might set the Y scale factor to -1 if Y represents depth from the surface).
   
• Bug fix: Erasing a curve did not properly shift the "hidden" properties of all curves following the erased curve. For example if curve #2 was hidden and you deleted it, curve #3 (now curve #2) would then be hidden.
   
• Bug fix: The recent change forcing vertical lines to be drawn vertical on 3D plots allowed small roundoff errors at azimuths of 90 and 270 degrees to, in effect, draw a plan view (looking straight down) of the surface regardless of elevation angle.
   
• Bug fix: Specify Columns to Plot dialog omitted the last digit from entries in the last column if the columns were space-separated (rather than comma- or tab-separated). This was a visual problem only; the file was interpreted correctly.
   
• Bug fix: With vertical labels on the Y axis of XY plots, the last label may have been omitted from metafile output, particularly if the plot did not have a title line (which pushed the upper extent of the metafile up).
   
• Bug fix: It was possible to unintentionally select a hidden curve with Edit mode.
   
• Bug fix: If you set the number of contour intervals to 1 on a 2D contour plot with contour lines (rather than shades), using either the Contour Options dialog or the ContourLevels macro/DDE command, no lines were drawn. This was a side effect of a change in version 1.9 that allows you to define contour levels as wrapping from the low to high value by setting the same colors for the low and high ends of the scale.
   
• Bug fix: Standard metafiles (as opposed to enhanced metafiles) of 2D contour line plots copied to the clipboard had random character heights for the axis labels.
   
• Bug fix: The recent change of allowing you to clip a 3D plot in the Z direction by checking "Specify Extents" introduced a problem with drawing grid lines on the plot. Drawing grid lines might have taken an exceptionally long time if the extents were several orders of magnitude smaller than the actual data extents.
   
• XYZSurface and XYZScatter functions of the Excel Add-In have been modified to check the number of used rows in the selection. Previous versions assumed that all rows within the selection contained data, which resulted in sending 65,536 data points to DPlot when you selected a column by clicking on the column heading rather than dragging the cursor over the rows actually populated with data. Those excess data points were all set to 0,0,0. This did not cause any serious problems but of course slowed the entire process down markedly.
   

28 May 2004
Version 1.9.6.3

• Added the ability to change the orientation of numbers along the axes to 45 degrees or vertical. See Options>Number Formats. These settings are applied to most XY plots, 2D views of 3D data, and the amplitude scale of 1D plots. Added corresponding LabelDirection macro/DDE command.
   
• For 3D plots, made a minor change to the 3D projection that forces vertical lines to remain vertical. In previous versions vertical lines were usually drawn at a very small angle from vertical.
   
• User-specified extents on all plots of 3D points are now fully functional. Previous versions ignored the extents for some types of plots.
   
• For logarithmic scales on XY plots you may now specify extents that are not 1, 2, or 5 times a power of 10. The actual extents will be rounded to the nearest number with 2 significant figures that includes the specified extents. Default extents are unchanged and will always be 1, 2, or 5 times a power of 10.
   
• Added Minor tick marks option to the Log Scale Tick Labels menu command, which is a bit more important given the above change.
   
• Symbol frequency setting on the Symbol/Line Styles dialog for XY plots is now an individual setting for each curve, rather than being applied to all curves. Changed the SymbolFrequency macro/DDE command to take this new ability into account.
   
• Negative amplitudes are now allowed on polar plots. If all amplitudes are > 0, DPlot still forces the center of the plot to be at radius = 0, unless you change the extents with the Extents/Tick Marks/Size command.
   
• List Peaks within a Range menu command now displays the same mean, standard deviation, and standard error report given by List Peaks.
   
• Recent addition of specifying a fixed number of decimal places on axis labels is now applied to scientific notation and "powers of 10" number formats as well as the default number format. Both of these number formats now display more significant digits when warranted; previous versions displayed no more than 5 digits.
   
• Added DateFormat and TimeFormat macro/DDE commands to control the display of axis labels using Calendar date, Date and time, or Time number formats.
   
• Default plot extents and tick mark interval for Calendar date and Date and time number formats are more sensible in this version. Previous versions used the same scheme as the default number format when the plot extents were less than 1 day. This very rarely resulted in limits that were whole hours, for example.
   
• Added Select All and Deselect All buttons to the Hide Curves dialog for XY plots.
   
• Plot extents were not recalculated after using the Delete Points in Box menu command.
   
• User-specified tick mark intervals were sometimes saved to DPlot files with an insufficient number of significant figures, particularly when working with a date scale with tick marks at some multiple of hours or minutes rather than days.
   
• Edit mode can now be used to find the distance between two data points on an XY plot. Right-click on a second point on the plot to activate this feature.
   
• Bug fix: An error in updating the settings file dplot.ini upon exit might have caused DPlot, DPlot Jr, and/or DPlot Viewer to crash on older Windows versions, in particular Windows 98 and Windows Me. This error was introduced in version 1.9.5.3.
   
• Bug fix: DPlot crashed under some circumstances when the number of tick mark intervals was set to 1.
   
• Bug fix: ManualScale macro/DDE command did not work properly for 3D scatter plots.
   
• Bug fix: Plot extents set with Extents/Tick Marks/Size for 3D plots were not properly restored from a DPlot file.
   
• Bug fix: Plot extents established with Get Preferences (rather than Extents/Tick Marks/Size) for XY plots were not saved properly to DPlot files.
   
• Bug fix: New Invert X and Invert Y features on the Extents/Tick Marks/Size dialog were saved to DPlot files improperly and caused an error message when the file was reopened.
   
• Bug fix: Operate on X failed to reset a flag indicating whether a curve had a constant spacing along the X axis. So if you used an operation that resulted in a curve having unequal spacing in X (e.g. X=1/X) when it previously did have a constant spacing and you subsequently saved the plot as a DPlot file, DPlot would erroneously save the fictitious spacing and the Y values only, resulting in a nonsense plot when you reopened the file. Thanks to Jim Drake for pointing out the problem.
   
• Amended the plugin interface to allow double-precision data on both input and output arrays. This change will not affect any old plugins, though new plugins that take advantage of this feature will require the current version of DPlot.
   
• Added double-precision versions of DPlot_Plot, DPlot_PlotToRect, DPlot_PlotBitmap, and DPlot_AddData to DPLOTLIB.DLL. Excel Add-In now uses the double-precision version of DPlot_Plot. For many users the most obvious advantage of this change is that date/time entries can now be sent via the Excel Add-In and the precision of the time value will be preserved (down to fractional microseconds). In previous versions date/time entries had a resolution of roughly 3 minutes.
   
• DPlot_Start function in DPLOTLIB.DLL (used by the Excel Add-In and all DPLOTLIB example programs) will now wait up to 5 seconds after successfully launching DPlot for an input idle before returning. This change was necessary for older systems, in particular those running Windows 98, but should not result in any performance penalty for other systems.
   
• Added DPlot_GetVersion function to DPLOTLIB.DLL. This function returns the version number of DPlot (or DPlot Jr) that will be launched by DPlot_Start or any other DPLOTLIB function. The return value of the function indicates whether the full version of DPlot or DPlot Jr will be used.
   

7 May 2004
Version 1.9.5.4

• Improved efficiency of the Delete Thin Triangles command for 3D surface plots. This command will now run much faster with large data sets.
   
• Amended TickInterval and NumTicks menu/DDE commands to include support for the Z axis on 3D plots.
   
• Bug fix: There was a potentially DPlot-crashing bug associated with the recent change of allowing multiple-line title lines and axis labels. This would only occur with metafiles of contour plots, and on all test systems was only a serious problem when running one of the Visual Basic demo programs.
   
• Bug fix: Recalculate extents of XY plots after hiding/unhiding curves was broken by the last revision's changes to the Hide curves command.
   

2 May 2004
Version 1.9.5.3

• You can produce an XY plot from a 3D surface plot that is the intersection of a vertical plane with the 3D surface. See Generate>XY Plot from 3D Surface and/or the corresponding XYZ_to_XY menu/DDE command.
   
• User-specified extents on 3D plots of random 3D points and 3D scatter plots may now be used to view a subset of the data. In previous versions user-specified extents could only be used to "zoom out" on 3D plots. Triangles (or data points on scatter plots) that are not completely inside those extents will not be drawn.
   
• Removed Random spike removal from the Filter command for XY plots and made it a more flexible standalone menu command.
   
• Added Delete Points in Box command to Edit menu. This command allows you to define a box with your mouse cursor, inside of which all visible data points on XY plots will be deleted.
   
• DPlot now does a better job of drawing grid lines on 3D plots of gridded Z values. Previous versions had a few problems with drawing order and roundoff errors, causing gaps in grid lines.
   
• Title lines and axis labels may now use multiple lines. You can add a line break to these entries by embedding a "\n" sequence (the actual characters \n, not a linefeed character) in the string.
   
• Added an option to the Symbol/Line Styles dialog to size symbols in Y units (Z units on 3D scatter plots) rather than 1000th's of inches. If checked, symbols will be resized when you zoom in or out or change the plot extents so that they are proportionately the same size relative to the amplitudes of the plot. Added corresponding SymbolSizeUnits macro/DDE command.
   
• Added Reference lines menu command and corresponding RefLine and DeleteRefLine macro/DDE commands. This allows you to quickly add horizontal or vertical lines to XY plots at a user-specified X or Y value without going to the trouble of creating a new "curve".
   
• Changed Hide all curves but... command on the View menu to Hide curves and made it obvious which curves are already hidden by including checkmarks in the curve list.
   
• On XY plots, you may now have 0 data values and still use a log scale. These points will be ignored, much as points outside the limits using the Amplitude Limits command are ignored: If point N-1 is positive, point N is 0, and point N+1 is positive, you will not get a line segment drawn between point N-1 and N+1.
   
• DPlot, DPlot Jr, and DPlot Viewer are now compressed using ASPack. This results in a moderately smaller download size and a much smaller installed executable (for example, dplot.exe goes from 3255Kb to 660Kb).
   
• Bug fix: When reading ASCII text files containing multiple data sets of x,y,z points for a 3D scatter plot, DPlot crashed if the file was terminated with two or more blank lines.
   
• Bug fix: Choosing to display a plot's filename by use of the Print Caption menu command or ShowCaption macro/DDE command was not properly saved to a DPlot file.
   
• Bug fix: With logarithmic scales, panning a zoomed plot by use of the mouse will pan the nearest number of log cycles. This is by design. However, if you drag less than 1/2 log cycle then the arrow associated with dragging remained on the plot.
   
• Bug fix: Roundoff error might have caused placement of coordinate axes in XY and 1D plots to be off by 1 pixel.
   
• Bug fix: Move up and Move down legend right-click menu items, Reorder Curves menu command and ReorderCurves macro/DDE command might have caused a crash if the plot had more than 16 curves.
   
• Bug fix: GetPreferences macro/DDE command failed to update the plot.
   
• Bug fix: DPlot Jr's File Format dialog used by the Save As... command has been fouled up for several versions, having not kept up with the full version's inclusion of Tab-separated values as an output option.
   
• Bug fix: Previous versions of the Excel Add-In used Integer data types where Long should have been used. The end result was that you were limited to plotting a total of 32767 data points, and you would get an Overflow error in Excel when attempting to plot more points. This has been corrected; you can now plot an arbitrarily large number of points, subject to Excel's limitation of 64K rows.
   
• Amended Excel Add-In to include support for Excel's Percent formatting.
   

12 April 2004
Version 1.9.4.3

• Bah... corrected a bug introduced in the last release. The new Invert X and Invert Y features broke the scaling on multiple Y axes.
   
• You can now use your mouse to pick coordinates in edit mode. In addition, using the mouse to pick X and/or Y values from an XY plot now uses appropriate rounding.
   

10 April 2004
Version 1.9.4.2

• Added support for up to 10 constants in the equation-parsing routines (Y=f(X), etc.)
   
• Added Invert X and Invert Y checkboxes to the Extents/Tick Marks/Size dialog box for XY plots, and added an equivalent InvertAxes menu/DDE command. This feature allows you to invert the normal scaling of the axes without manually specifying the axis extents.
   
• Added AxisType menu/DDE command, which is equivalent to the Grid Lines or Box selections on the Options menu for XY plots.
   
• Edit mode (click on a point to edit the coordinates and/or add a label) is now much more functional for XY plots. Changes are reflected in the plot automatically rather than after you click OK. Also added Insert, Next, and Previous buttons in addition to Delete.
   
• Tick marks with Axes Only or Box Around Plot are now drawn using the same pen width used for grid lines.
   
• Bug fix: Error bar information was not correctly restored from a saved DPlot file unless the data values happened to be evenly spaced in X.
   
• Bug fix: FilePrint(1) menu/DDE command was broken (the "1" is meant to open the Print dialog, where you can select a printer/change printer settings before printing. FilePrint(0) (equivalent to FilePrint()), which prints to the default printer using the current printer settings, worked fine.)
   
• Bug fix: Example DPLOTLIB source code for Absoft FORTRAN resulted in "unresolved external" errors with the linker due to Absoft's default method for passing character string arguments.
   

1 April 2004
Version 1.9.3.8

• Bug fix: Recent change to the List Peaks menu command to display additional information might have caused memory problems seemingly unrelated to this command. In particular, saving a file after using List Peaks might have caused DPlot to crash.
   

30 March 2004
Version 1.9.3.7

• Bug fix: Plots created with [XY()] or [XYXY()] DDE commands and saved as DPlot files were under some circumstances misjudged to have a constant interval in X (which affects how the data is stored in the DPlot file). Thanks to Christophe Boucher for his help in tracking down this problem.
   
• Added DeleteLabel macro/DDE command to delete data point labels created with a TextPointLabel command or Label Points menu command.
   
• List Peaks menu command now displays mean, standard deviation, and standard error values for each curve (along with the minimum and maximum amplitudes).
   
• Fixed a problem with the Excel Add-In that caused columns containing blank cells and plotted with XYYY to produce nonsense plots.
   
• The installation for the Excel Add-In is now a bit more forgiving if it cannot find EXCEL.EXE. This was particularly a problem with users who had Excel installed but did not have Excel set as the default application to use for .xls files.
   

26 March 2004
Version 1.9.3.4

• You may now pan on zoomed XY plots by clicking and dragging in addition to using the arrow keys.
   
• Ten zoom levels are now maintained. Previous versions kept track of only 4.
   
• Bug fix: Recent change of adding support for data point labels on polar plots caused a problem with other plot types - if you used $X in the label to display the X coordinate of a point, the label was actually mod(X,360).
   
• FileSaveAs macro/DDE command did not append a default extension if no extension was supplied. It also failed to update the document caption when saving DPlot files.
   

10 March 2004
Version 1.9.3.2 update

There were several problems with the installation of the DPlot Interface Add-In for Microsoft Excel, namely that it did not work properly on Windows Me or with foreign-language versions of Excel. And it was impossible to install the Add-In on Excel 97 unless macros were enabled. These problems have been corrected in both the evaluation and licensed versions. If you have already installed DPlot 1.9.3.2 and the above applies to you, you can download this much smaller (95Kb) update. Save addinstall.exe to any folder on your hard disk and run it to install the Add-In.

6 March 2004
Version 1.9.3.2

• Added Find Intersections command on the Info menu for XY plots, and corresponding macro/DDE command FindIntersections. This command finds all intersections between 2 curves and optionally adds data points at those intersections and labels those points.
   
• Bug fix: A bug in the last several versions results in incorrect placement of 2D contour plots saved or copied to the Clipboard as metafiles.
   
• Corrected faulty advice in the setup workbook for the Excel Add-In on Excel 97; it is not possible to load the Add-In on Excel 97 or earlier versions without enabling macros.
   
• Made a couple of small adjustments to the way a box is drawn around an XY plot. In previous versions the box was drawn completely inside the extents of the plot, which tended to obscure portions of curves in the corners and may have given the impression of faulty scaling. The problem was particularly noticeable in metafiles. The box is now drawn with the longitudinal axis of each line segment at the respective plot extent.
   

1 March 2004
Version 1.9.3.1

• Added an optional Microsoft Excel Add-In module to the distribution. If you frequently plot data from Excel you should find this feature a big improvement over copying and pasting.
   
• Added Percent number format.
   
• Added the ability to specify the number of decimal places for the default number format (also used in new Percent format).
   
• Bug fix: There were a couple of problems associated with the recent ability to read times (along with dates and currencies) from text files. Fractional seconds were discarded, and DPlot incorrectly decided that column types didn't match from one line to the next if the time values in one line were not in the exact same character position as the time values in the previous line.
   
• Bug fix: Z axis label on 3D plots used the font for the Y axis.
   
• Bug fix: Equation parser caused DPlot to crash in some circumstances when the equation contained extraneous spaces. In particular 'X+ .2' failed, while 'X+.2' or 'X+ 0.2' worked as expected.
   
• Bug fix: Depending on the order of operations, it was possible to save an XY plot with multiple independent Y axes that you've zoomed in on with nonsense zoom window values for the independent Y axis. Reading that file would then cause DPlot to crash.
   
• Bug fix: Recent improvements to the performance of antialiased symbols did not work on Windows 95 or 98.
   
• Bug fix: If a macro resulted in DPlot crashing, the macro facility was left running in an endless loop with a tendency to hog the processor. Though the goal is of course for no macros to cause DPlot to crash, this version of the macro facility will gracefully exit if it finds that DPlot is no longer running.
   

22 February 2004
Version 1.9.3

• Several aspects of working with polar plots were either confusing or did not work properly. Thanks to Ray Delaforce for many of the suggestions:
  • Selecting data points with the mouse in Edit Mode did not work particularly well with polar plots, and not at all for angles in radians rather than degrees.
     
  • Setting the angular tick mark interval on polar plots did not work properly, and it also wasn't clear whether the input should be in degrees or radians.
     
  • Specify extents on the Extents/Tick Marks/Size dialog isn't appropriate for the angular dimension, and in any case produced strange results. These controls are now disabled and hidden, with the extents of course fixed at 0-360 degrees.
     
  • Scan data inappropriately limited you to scanning a (in some cases) small subset of your data.
     
  • You can now zoom in on polar plots.
     
  • In previous versions if you set the radial extents to a value smaller than the maximum radius, the plot was not clipped correctly. This has been fixed (also applies to zoom).
     
• Threw out Dense grid lines menu command in favor of more general settings under the Extents/Tick marks/Size command. In previous versions minor grid lines were either on or off, and if on DPlot decided on the interval. You may now specify the number of minor divisions on both axes. These settings are also applied to tick marks as well as grid lines (previously only grid lines were affected). If you have previously saved a DPlot file with the Dense grid lines option checked, the number of intermediate levels on both the X and Y axes will be set to 4. You can quickly change this setting with the new controls on the Extents/Tick marks/Size dialog.
   
• Added Number Formats command for all 3D plots.
   
• For Powers of 10 number formatting on log scales, if Log Scale Tick Labels is set to Powers of 10 only, then the leading "1x" is omitted.
   
• Relaxed one requirement for bar charts: In previous versions, bar charts required the same constant spacing in X for all data sets. In this version, if only one data set is used then the X values can have an arbitrary spacing. The same requirement is still applied if multiple data sets are used. Also added a bar chart option to draw bars from the given X value to the next X, which is only meaningful in the case of non-constant spacing.
   
• Added ErrorBar, ErrorBarPenWidth, ErrorBarWidth, and LegendShow macro/DDE commands.
   
• Filled areas created with Fill between curves may now include a text entry that is placed in the legend. Amended FillBetween macro/DDE command to account for this new ability.
   
• Added a new General option to recalculate the plot extents after hiding a curve or making a previously hidden curve visible, and ignoring hidden curves in the determination of the extents. By default the plot extents are left unchanged after hiding a curve.
   
• FileSaveAs macro/DDE command now accepts replaceable parameters in the filename. For example, in the "filename" c:\temp\|TITLE1|.dat, |TITLE1| will be replaced with the first title line in the plot. See the description of the FileSaveAs command in the Help file for more information.
   
• Significantly improved the performance of anti-aliased symbols, 10x or more depending on the number of identical symbols on the plot.
   
• Added a Delete button to the Insert Link dialog to help do a bit of housekeeping with the Recently used links list.
   
• Fixed a bug that caused DPlot to crash when reading file type B if the file contained more than one data set and the data arrays were not large enough to accomodate the new data.
   
• Fixed a bug with 3D scatter plots that sometimes caused symbols to be drawn in black rather than the correct color when multiple data sets were plotted.
   
• Fixed a problem with reading multiple-column ASCII files (file type D). In recent versions DPlot balked at blank, quote-delimited columns (two successive quotation marks). It also had trouble parsing quote-delimited dates if one or more spaces were included immediately after the opening quotation mark.
   
• Filled areas created with Fill between curves were not clipped properly in metafiles after zooming in or setting the plot extents such that a portion of the fill area extended outside the plot box.
   
• Corrected a problem with automatically-generated window captions (produced by an FFT, for example). The first FFT would result in a window caption of 'FFT', the second (properly) in 'FFT1', but then the third and all subsequent FFT's would also use 'FFT1'.
   

4 February 2004
Version 1.9.2.8

• Added selections to the Units dialog for tripartite grids to make it quite a bit easier to plot the period of an oscillation (rather than the frequency) on the X axis. This could be accomplished in previous versions only by using user-defined constants. Thanks to Thomas Rockaway for the suggestion.
   
• Fixed a problem with reading multiple-column ASCII files (type D on the Select File Type dialog). In the last few revisions, DPlot balked at blank lines in the header.
   
• Fixed a bug in text output functions. Tabs in notes (or any other text) that contained special control characters (subscript, superscript, etc.) were in effect ignored.
   

30 January 2004
Version 1.9.2.7

• A semi-random problem caused point labels on polar charts to point to the wrong location.
   

29 January 2004
Version 1.9.2.6

• One more problem associated with the switch from single- to double-precision data: Waterfall plots were drawn with a semi-random base plane. Thanks to Gunnar Franke for pointing out the problem.
   
• Selecting Calendar date or Date/time number formatting with values greater than the maximum magnitude of a 32-bit integer (in particular, numbers in the form YYYYMMDDHHMM), caused DPlot to crash. This same action now displays a message box with, in the case of the X axis, a reminder to use the YYYYMMDDHHMM to Serial command if appropriate.
   
• Zooming out with data processing mode turned on sometimes gave incorrect results or caused DPlot to crash.
   
• DPlot files saved with data processing mode on did not properly restore data processing mode when opened from Explorer (as opposed to the Open command within DPlot). Specifically, pressure and acceleration records did not cause DPlot to automatically generate integrated impulse or velocity and displacement records.
   
• DPlot failed to correctly interpret multiple column data files that contained fewer than 20 lines of data and included one of more non-data lines after the data.
   
• Licensed version only: Raw Data file import plugin has been amended to read (if present) a short header containing the number of data sets and the sampling rate for the file. You may now also enter a different default extension for these files; files with this extension will be opened by the plugin when dropped onto DPlot, and you can also associate this extension with DPlot so that double-clicking on a file with this extension in Explorer will open the file with DPlot. Thanks to Chris Rouleau for all of the suggestions.
   

19 January 2004
Version 1.9.2.2

• Bug fix: One more (hopefully the last) leftover problem associated with switching from single- to double-precision data. The Edit Data command contained a few steps that resulted in translating data from double- to single- and back to double-precision, possibly resulting in the loss of significant figures, particularly when dealing with YYYYMMDDHHMM date/time values.
   
• Polar plots: 1) Radial axis labels are drawn along the 0 degree radius. Previously these labels were always drawn along a horizontal line extending to the right from the center of the plot, regardless of whether "0 degrees at top of plot" was checked. 2) Added an option to center radial axis labels on the associated radius. By default these labels are drawn below or to the left of the radius.
   

17 January 2004
Version 1.9.2

• Added Redo command (compliment of Undo) and Redo toolbar button.
   
• Added user preferences for time format on the Number Formats dialog. Previous versions of DPlot always used the time format specified with Windows' Control Panel International (Regional Settings on some versions) applet.
   
• Added a new line style for XY plots.
   
• Added a new Date and Time number format, which differs from Calendar Date only in that the time value will always be displayed (if the time format string isn't blank), while Calendar Date displays the time only under certain circumstances, mostly to do with the granularity of the data.
   
• Added YYYYMMDDHHMM to Serial... command on the Edit menu for XY plots. You may now read date/time groups in the form YYYYMMDDHHMM (for example January 19, 2003 5:25 PM would be input as 200301191725). For DPlot to do anything particularly useful with these numbers requires that they be translated to the Excel 1900 date system, otherwise large gaps would exist between one hour and the next, one month and the next, etc. The YYYYMMDDHHMM to Serial... translates input X values to the Excel 1900 date system, automatically turns on the new Date and Time number format for the X axis, and adjusts the time format setting dependent on the granularity of the input values.
   
• Added Hexadecimal number formatting. You have a choice of 1-, 2-, or 4-byte output, as well as a choice of prefixes.
   
• Minor change to Grain Size Distribution plots now only draws the descriptive labels (Cobbles, Gravel, etc.) that fit within the extents of the plot.
   
• Added an input for the bar width on bar charts/histograms. By default in previous versions, bars butted up against each other (100% width). Default width is now 100% for generated histograms and 75% for all other bar charts, and may be controlled with Options>Linear/Log Scaling>Bar Chart Options.
   
• It is now possible to have bar charts for "curves" consisting of a single point (a single bar) per curve.
   
• Added unit selections for Acceleration plots in Data Processing mode.
   
• Fill Between Curves functionality has been extended to allow you to fill the area between a curve and the X axis, or a curve and a horizontal line with a specified constant Y value. In the latter case, you may also specify different colors for the areas above and below the reference line. For programmers, see the updated description of the FillBetween command. The background of custom fill patterns is now consistent with the pre-defined patterns: the background is transparent.
   
• Axes at 0 tick marks, labels, and line(s) are no longer obscured by curves or fills between curves.
   
• Added an option to turn the radial axis labels on polar plots 90 degrees.
   

Bugs

• Cancel button on Y=f(X,Y1,Y2,...) dialog... didn't cancel.
   
• All 1.9+ versions with 2D contour plots that use "Specify size" had the drawing scale fouled up. This bug was introduced when adding the ability to use negative scale factors.
   
• Fixed a visual bug on the Number Formats dialog that may or may not have shown up on your system, mostly dependent on your screen resolution.
   
• Move/copy curves command did not flag the target plot as changed, or the source plot as changed in the case of a Move (rather than Copy). The result was that you would not be prompted to save these documents when closing them.
   
• Polar plots with angular measurements in degrees that had clockwise angles rather than the default counterclockwise were scaled incorrectly.
   
• Radial axis labels on polar plots sometimes used the incorrect font.
   

Licensed version only:

• The BMP Picture file export plugin now does a much better job of preserving all colors in the picture. In previous versions, colors set with text formatting commands and colors associated with anti-aliasing symbols (as opposed to colors set explicitly in the color palette) may not have been preserved in the run-length-encoded 256-color bitmap.
   
• The More Curve Fits plugin has been amended to include the equation form y=A*(x+B)^C
   
• The Raw Data file import plugin has been amended to include support for single- and double-precision floating point numbers and multiple data sets, and also has inputs for the X interval between points and an option to read the X interval and number of data sets from a short (8-byte) header in the file.
   

2003   2005