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Revision History (Archives, 2006)

December 2, 2006
Version 2.0.7.6

• Added Bubble plots (XY plot with a third dimension mapped to symbol size and/or symbol color). Added corresponding Bubbles macro/DDE command.
   
• Added Operate on X and Operate on Y commands to the Edit menu for 3D and 4D surface and scatter plots.
   
• Improved the Define Boundary command for 3D surfaces. In previous versions small roundoff problems might have caused triangles inside the border to be deleted, and/or triangles outside the border to be retained.
   
• For triangle plots, numbers along the X and Z axis are now rotated to make it more clear which grid lines are referenced by a particular axis. Added "Clockwise" option (by default the numbers along each axis increase in a counterclockwise direction around the plot.)
   
• Saving a graph as a DPlot file now results in that filename being added to the MRU (most recently used) list. Previously only opened files were added to the list.
   
• Bug fix: DPlot ignored the "Scatter plot" setting on the Open dialog for 4D data, always producing a surface plot.
   
• Bug fix: Saving a 4D surface or scatter plot to a CSV file did not work properly, and in some cases might have crashed.
   
• Bug fix: Menues for new 4D plots did not work properly with DPlot Jr or DPlot Viewer.
   

November 26, 2006
Version 2.0.7.5

• Added support for 4D surface and scatter plots. These are similar to the 3D counterparts, but a 4th dimension is used to determine the color of the surface/data point.
   
• Physical dimensions for line widths, symbol size, plot width and height and others now allows unit specifications rather than requiring inches. Choose between in or " for inches, pt (points), mm, and cm. Default units displayed in these text boxes is controlled with a new setting on the General Options dialog. (This change has no effect on macro/DDE commands; dimensions used in those commands will continue to be inches or thousandths of inches.)
   
• The multiple print feature now allows you to specify border lines between each document.
   
• (Licensed version) Tektronix file import plugin now includes support for older Tektronix oscilloscopes (500,600,700 series).
   
• X=f(T), Y=g(T) command did not previously automatically set the legend for the curve produced by that command.
   
• Amended the behavior of the "Prevent divide by 0" option for Y=f(X) and similar commands to include checking against invalid arguments, e.g. log(0). If such an error is encountered then the independent variable is incremented by a very small value and the function is evaluated again.
   
• Amended the EditDecimate macro/DDE command such that the start and stop X values are optional. If omitted, the corresponding minimum or maximum X values for the curve are used. In other words if both the start and stop values are omitted then the entire curve is operated on.
   
• Bug fix: Average Points and Skip Points commands were broken in the last several versions if "Apply to ALL points" was not checked.
   
• Bug fix: The Undo feature did not work correctly for Generate plugins that replaced existing data (as opposed to creating new curves).
   
• Bug fix: DPlot might have crashed when using Info>Interpolate on a large number (> 60 or so) of curves.
   
• Bug fix: When using the "Pick columns to plot" feature with "Alternating X,Y columns" checked, DPlot would sometimes insert an undefined point (generally 0,0) at the start of the 2nd and all subsequent curves.
   

October 3, 2006
Version 2.0.7.4

• In previous versions, DPlot hogged the processor unnecessarily during mouse operations: dragging a rectangle, zooming, etc.
   
• Added Set Limits to Min/Max in Box command to the Options menu for 3D data. This command allows you to drag the cursor across the plot to define a box; the minimum and maximum Z values within that box will then be used as the lower and upper contour intervals. Disabled in 3D views.
   
• Bug fix: DPlot crashed if you attempted to create a 3D scatter plot containing only 1 data point.
   
• Bug fix: If the numbers along the X axis decreased from left to right on a linear scale, the Multiple axes function with a second X axis some linear function of the first did not work properly. Generally the first label was drawn but no others were.
   
• Bug fix: If the columns in a CSV file included a trailing comma or tab, DPlot would crash when attempting to read this file unless you checked "Pick columns to plot" and deselected the last (in this case non-existant) column. This bug was an unfortunate side effect of the fairly recent change allowing blank entries in columns.
   

September 24, 2006
Version 2.0.7.1

• Amended DPLOT_PLOTMETRICS structure to additionally return the extents of a 2nd Y axis, if one is used. This structure is used in calls to DPlot_GetBitmapEx. Also documented previously available (but not especially well-documented) structure members that can be used to translate 3D coordinates to pixel values for 3D views.
   
• Amended plugin interface for File Import and Generate plugins to allow a command string (consisting of commands using the same syntax as DPLOTLIB's DPlot_Command function). This new feature is used in the new Mohr's Circle plugin to force the plot size and extents such that circles are circular.
   
• Added $RMS text shortcut. This shortcut is replaced with the Root-Mean-Square of the amplitudes for a curve or surface. The RMS of a curve/surface is the square root of (sum of the squares of the amplitudes divided by the number of data points).
   
• For bar charts, added Base of bars at minimum Y extent option. If checked, the base of all (unstacked) bars will be set to the lower edge of the graph. If unchecked, the base of all bars will be at Y=0 (as in all previous versions).
   
• Added Elapsed time (h:mm:ss) number format.
   
• Modified Time of day number format to include .0 and .00 descriptors for tenths and hundredths of seconds, respectively.
   
• Several changes have been made to reading multiple-column text files:
  • Added "Process entire file" checkbox to the Open dialog. If checked, comment lines may be included in the file after the start of the data and will be ignored. In previous versions, after the start of the data any line that did not contain the same number of data columns was considered the end of the data, and DPlot stopped processing the file at that point.
     
  • Previous versions might have stopped reading the file if a blank line was encountered in the file header.
     
  • Date and time pairs were only combined if separated by a space and the date was in the first column. In this version a date is also combined with a following time if the two columns are separated by a comma or tab, and the date may be in any column.
     
• Find intersections menu command was previously limited to finding 10 intersections between curves. The limit has been increased to 100 in this version.
   
• Subtract surfaces menu command for 3D surface plots has been changed to the more general Z3=f(Z1,Z2). You may now add, multiply or divide surfaces in addition to subtracting them.
   
• Lighting parameters for 3D surface plots are now saved to preference files.
   
• Bug fix: Copying a graph to the clipboard or saving a graph to a bitmap format might have resulted in a crash under some circumstances if the graph contained multiple point labels and several documents were open.
   
• Bug fix: Under some circumstances the text controls for the graph extents on the Extents/Intervals/Size dialog were interpreted incorrectly, particularly when dates or date/time groups were used on any axis.
   
• Bug fix: The X=f(T), Y=g(T) had an old, arbitrary limit of 16384 generated points still in place and presented an annoying MessageBox if you attempted to generated more points than that.
   
• Bug fix: Amplitude labels for bar charts used the number format for the Y axis, but not the proper routine for drawing that text. If your Y axis used fractions, for example, you might see a label that looked like {\u3}/{\d4} (for 3/4).
   
• Bug fix: The relatively recent change allowing insertion of data points in XY plots with the mouse using Edit>Edit Data did not work especially well. In most cases two new points were added for every mouse click.
   
• Bug fix: Generate plugins that produced a new document failed with no error message if the document that was operated on did not have a sufficient maximum number of curves or points per curve.
   
• Bug fix: Manual extents saved to the default preferences file (default.set) for a 3D surface plot might have caused DPlot to crash when subsequently reading a 3D text file because of an uninitialized data problem.
   
• Bug fix: Title lines and axis labels from preference files were wiped out when reading 3D data from a text file, whether or not the file contained header lines.
   
• Bug fix: FFT might have crashed for a small, odd number of input data points if "Run FFT as is" was checked.
   

August 5, 2006
Version 2.0.6.7

• Bar charts can use the same fill patterns as the "Fill Between Curves" feature. Previous versions were limited to either hollow or solid bars. Added corresponding FillStyle macro/DDE command.
   
• Bug fix: For text notes with locations specified in data space, the Notes dialog did not display the coordinates of the note if Time number format was used, due to an uninitialized data problem.
   
• Bug fix: There were a couple of problems with point labels that might have resulted in those labels being tossed out after saving and reopening a DPlot file.
   
• Bug fix: Version 2.0.6.2's new features to read text files faster contained several bugs that in many cases made this routine slower than before. This change will primarily be of interest to users reading files containing several hundred thousand or more points.
   

July 28, 2006
Version 2.0.6.2

• Date format list on the Number Formats dialog now includes "<none>". If selected, the date will not be displayed. This might be useful for Date and Time format when you only want to show the time of day.
   
• Previous versions always forced the extents of XY plots to be multiples of the tick mark interval, regardless of whether you had set the extents with the Extents/Intervals/Size command. In this version, on an unzoomed plot DPlot will honor the specified lower limit. The upper limit will always be the lower limit plus some multiple of the tick mark interval.
   
• Most dialog boxes that include a list of curves now allow you to select/deselect a curve by clicking on the graph (in addition, of course, to selecting the curve within the list box).
   
• Added $AREA text shortcut (XY plots only). This shortcut is replaced by the area under a curve (calculated with the trapezoidal rule), measured from Y=0.
   
• Print caption menu command was arbitrarily omitted from the Text menues of 1D and 3D plots.
   
• For XY plots, a curve's visibility state (hidden or not, set with View>Hide curves or the legend right-click menu) is saved to a DPlot file. In previous versions all curves were initially made visible when reading a DPlot file.
   
• Erasing a curve now results in color assignments being shifted as expected.
   
• DPlot does a better job of allocating memory for multiple-column text files. In previous versions DPlot might have made multiple passes through the file, creeping up on the required number of points and in many cases overshooting by up to a factor of 2. This version uses the file size to estimate the required number of points and is faster and more conservative with memory allocation.
   
• Bug fix: For XY plots with data sent to DPlot via DPlot_AddData, the extents of the plot were sometimes not updated correctly when AutoScale was in effect.
   
• Bug fix: Reading multiple-column text files with one or more (but not all) columns delimited by quotation marks was broken by the recent change of allowing blank entries.
   
• Bug fix: When adding more than one point label at a time to a 3D plot, the X and Y location of the currently selected label were not updated properly.
   
• Bug fix: Extents and other parameters were not recalculated after using the Edit Mode tool. This might have led, for example, to reporting an erroneous minimum, maximum, standard deviation, etc. when using the corresponding text shortcuts.
   
• Bug fix: Right-clicking on the numbers along the axes of a plot might have caused DPlot to crash due to an integer overflow error if the tick mark interval was very small relative to the value at the cursor ("very small" in this case being about 1/100 million'th of the value).
   
• Bug fix: DPlot might have accepted nonsense values for point label parameters saved to a DPlot file and subsequently crashed after selecting the Label Points command on the Text menu.
   

June 5, 2006
Version 2.0.5.7

• Edit Data feature was previously limited to editing 16,384 points. In this version there is no limit on the number of points on Windows 2000 and later versions of Windows. Under Windows 95 and 98 the limit is 32,767 points.
   
• Point labels may be added to box-and-whisker plots and dot graphs.
   
• When reading space-delimited multiple-column text files, DPlot previously relied on column headings being right-justified with the associated data columns. This often led to misinterpreting the column headings. In this version the justification is ignored; column headings are assumed to be space-delimited just as the data is. Note that this means that column headings may not contain spaces unless the text is surrounded by quotation marks. (This limitation does not apply to comma- or tab-separated columns.)
   
• In multiple-column text files DPlot will now accept dates in the form mm/yyyy. In previous versions the day of the month was also required in order for DPlot to correctly interpret the entry as a date. When mm/yyyy is used, the date is set to the first day of that month.
   
• In tab-separated text files (and only tab-separated, not comma- or space-separated), DPlot now correctly interprets commas used as thousands delimiters.
   
• DPlot now allows 3D surface plots that have no variation in Z (a horizontal plane, in other words).
   
• Added settings for point label arrow and line dimensions. Programmatically these values may be set with the new TextPointLabelLeader macro/DDE command.
   
• Bug fix: If "Always auto-adjust scale factors for 3D plots" option was selected, DPlot would override user-specified scale factors after printing a plot.
   
• Bug fix: DPlot did not properly handle clipboard data with lines terminated by a carriage return only (as opposed to a carriage return/line feed pair).
   
• Bug fix: DPlot crashed when saving 3D surface plots if you used a custom color palette with only 1 color.
   
• Bug fix: Manually-entered extents were not saved to DPlot files with sufficient precision when working with dates and times.
   
• Bug fix: For university subscriptions only, a timing problem with the splash screen might have caused DPlot to close immediately unless the /NONAG command line switch was used.
   
• Bug fix: If you checked the "Add labels at intersections" option of the Find Intersections command, any existing point labels might have been shifted to a different point, depending on whether that point occurred before or after an intersection.
   
• Bug fix: DPlot crashed if it was minimized when GenerateMesh, FFT, Histogram, or other commands that opened a new document window were used. In this version DPlot will be restored before opening a new document window.
   

May 3, 2006
Version 2.0.5.3

• Excel Add-In BarChart command automatically sets the orientation of labels on the X axis to vertical if more than 10 labels are selected.
   
• Added ForAllDocuments and matching NextDocument statements for macros. Every macro command between a ForAllDocuments and NextDocument will be performed for all open documents, rather than only the currently active document.
   
• All parameters for TextFont macro/DDE command are now optional, other than the font index.
   
• Changed "More Curve Fits" plugin (licensed version only) slightly. In previous versions this module would not accept curves that had two or more points at the same X. This version allows adjacent points to have the same X. (If for whatever reason your data is not sorted in increasing X order and it should be, you can sort the data points using Edit>Sort.)
   
• Tektronix file import plugin (licensed version only) now includes support for DPO7000 and DSA/DPO70000 instruments.
   
• Bug fix: Same problem fixed by version 2.0.5.1 for text files existed for pasting data from the clipboard.
   
• Bug fix: For 3D views of 3D points on a rectangular grid, the "Draw borders" feature sometimes resulted in border lines being partially overwritten by adjoining triangles.
   
• Bug fix: For XY plots in previous versions if all x or y values were identical, DPlot set the corresponding extents to x (or y) +/- 1. This led to a crash if the magnitude of that x or y value was large enough (about 2.25E15) that x-1 was indistinguishable from x+1. In this release if x=0, the extents are set to +/- 1. Otherwise the extents are set to 0.5x - 1.5x.
   

April 24, 2006
Version 2.0.5.1

• Bug fix: One more bug associated with the recent change allowing blank entries in CSV files has been found and fixed. In versions 2.0.4.7 - 2.0.5.0 if you opened a file containing more data rows than the current maximum number of points, DPlot might have crashed and/or produced a nonsense plot.
   

April 22, 2006
Version 2.0.5.0

• Changed the behavior of the Excel Add-In a bit. When appending a new curve to an existing plot using the "XYXY", "XYYY", or "X,Y,Label" commands, if the currently existing document has only one curve and that curve has no legend, then the Y axis label of that document is used as the legend of that existing curve, and the Y axis label is deleted.
   
  
• Another Excel Add-In change: In previous versions the XYYY command did not work correctly if a selection included blank columns. To make this work correctly you were required to make multiple selections with the Ctrl key. This version checks for and ignores blank columns.
   
  
• DPlot does a better job of trimming white space when "None" is used as the number format for the X or Y axes on an XY plot. Coupled with the printer margin bug fix mentioned below, this change makes the creation of graph paper occupying most of the allowable area of a page much easier. For examples see the Graph Paper page.
   
• DPlot now takes into account the position of text labels added with Text>X,Y Labels when finding the extents of a graph. In previous versions it was possible to position a label off the screen or printed page.
   
• Y=f(X) and similar functions as well as text boxes that accept an equation as input will now accept as arguments to the equation the text shortcuts (e.g. $YMAX, $MEAN, etc.) previously used only in title lines, axis labels, and other text entries. For example the equation "Y=X+$MEAN(3)" generates a curve with Y values equal to X plus the average amplitude of the third curve.
   
• The results of simple equations may now be included in title lines, axis labels, etc. Equations should be prefaced by "$=" and surrounded by parentheses. For example, "The square root of 5 is $=(sqrt(5))" will be replaced with "The square root of 5 is 2.23607". Coupled with the above change, you can include other text shortcuts in these equations, as in "Relative Standard Deviation=$=(100*$STDEV(1)/$MEAN(1))".
   
• "Check for Updates" (licensed version only) is improved. In previous versions you could only download a given update once. This worked fine in most cases, but became a problem if, for whatever reason, you overwrote the current version with an older one and then attempted to use "Check for Updates" to restore the current release.
   
• Bug fix: One more problem associated with the recent change of allowing blank entries in multiple columns of numbers (whether in a file or pasted from the Clipboard). If the columns were tab- or comma-separated but contained extra spaces, DPlot became confused about the number of columns.
   
• Bug fix: With many printer drivers DPlot erroneously added the specified print margins to the minimum margins for the printer. For normal plots this usually made little difference, but for blank graph paper made it very difficult to create paper that took up most or all of the allowable space on a page.
   
• Bug fix: If you right-clicked on a curve and selected the Color command but then clicked outside the color control to close the control, the control was hidden rather than closed, and still trapped all mouse clicks and arrow keys. Mouse clicks within the associated document window were then ignored.
   
• Bug fix: Distance from command needlessly updated every time an entry in a text box was changed in any way, rather than when a text box lost the focus. This made it impossible to correctly enter a date in the form m/d/yy.
   
• Bug fix: Function parser crashed DPlot if an operator (+,-,*,/,^) was not followed by an operand.
   

April 7, 2006
Version 2.0.4.7

• Added a bar chart command to the Excel Add-In which accepts non-numeric labels for the X axis.
   
  
• Added C# and FreeBASIC demo programs to the DPLOTLIB distribution. Improved method of finding DPLOTLIB.DLL when debugging your program within the Visual Basic or VB.NET (and now C#) development environments. DPLOTLIB.DLL and the associated example programs are included in the DPlot Jr setup and are also available as a separate download.
   
  
• Sped up 3D views of surface plots of random 3D points by an order of magnitude or more for a large number of points. Previous versions used a scanline z-buffer algorithm that minimized memory usage but had the unfortunate feature of looping through the same data many times. This version uses a z-buffer covering the entire screen (or other output device). The table below shows comparisons between previous versions and the new drawing method. Your results will of course vary, depending on processor speed and RAM. But the relationship should be consistent on all systems.
  

  Drawing time in milliseconds
  Number of points	Version 2.4.0.1	Version 2.4.0.7
  1,000	656	547
  10,000	2276	708
  50,000	8417	1062
  100,000	15739	1515
  500,000	75766	4276

  
   
• For XY plots, data columns imported either by pasting from the Clipboard or read from a file of one or more columns of numbers may now include blank entries. This includes blank spreadsheet cells when pasting from Excel, for example. Blank entries are ignored; if the n'th row for a column is blank then the associated curve will connect the (n-1)th and (n+1)th row values. For this feature to work as expected, columns must be tab-separated or comma-separated. (Columns copied in Excel are normally tab-separated).
   
• For XY plots, added an option on the Point Labels dialog to label all points in all curves. Modified the TextPointLabel macro/DDE command to include this capability.
   
• For 2D plots added the ability to draw the Y axis label(s) horizontally. To use this feature double-click on the Y axis label, or right-click and select "Horizontal". Added corresponding YAxisHorizontal macro/DDE command.
   
• Revised image export plugins to accept an optional resolution setting. Originally the resolution field was ignored and left at 0. This led to complaints that DPlot would not produce "high resolution" image files for publication, which of course was not correct. Subsequent versions arbitrarily set the resolution field to 800 dpi, which satisfied those users but caused a problem when importing DPlot-produced images into, among other programs, Microsoft Word: the bitmap was initially scaled to the pixel dimensions divided by the resolution: small, in other words. Please note that the resolution setting has absolutely no effect on the content of the image, other than the header field within the file. It is included for the benefit of those users who require this setting. The actual resolution of the image is determined by the program that displays and/or prints the image.
   
• Added ability to draw markers at data point locations for 3D data. Currently the marker is limited to a 3x3 black box. To draw markers at data points check the "Data points" box on the Contour Options dialog. Programmatically this feature can be turned on with [SymbolType(1,1)], where the symbol type (the 2nd argument) is 0 to turn markers off, or any non-zero number to turn markers on.
   
• Added the ability to hide text notes, using either the right-click dropdown menu or Text>Add/Edit Note.
   
• Error bars can now be drawn horizontally. This option is ignored for bar charts.
   
• Bar chart bars are now centered within their interval; in previous versions the bars were left justified for width settings less than 100%.
   
• "Draw sides" for 3D views of random 3D data now works much better than in all previous versions. Previous versions had problems with roundoff errors resulting in portions of edges being overwritten by other edge planes.
   
• Added a file import plugin (licensed version only) for LeCroy WavePro digital oscilloscopes.
   
• Bug fix: Recent change allowing tick marks on the outside edges of the graph did not work with exported metafiles: tick marks were clipped.
   
• Bug fix: It was possible to leave a popup tooltip showing graph coordinates active when switching to another application. This might have resulted in that popup window becoming semi-permanent when switching back to DPlot if another plot was created outside of DPlot, e.g. by the Excel Add-In.
   
• Bug fix: List Peaks in Box caused DPlot to crash if you simply clicked and released the mouse, rather than clicking and dragging.
   
• Bug fix: The CTRL+arrow key pan feature for zoomed plots did not work as expected if "Specify number" for the tick mark intervals was selected.
   
• Bug fix: The Histogram command used a different standard deviation calculation (1/N) than the $STDEV shortcut, List Peaks command, etc. (1/(N-1)). While valid, the histogram calculation has been changed to 1/(N-1) to be consistent.
   

March 4, 2006
Version 2.0.4.1

• Excel Add-In:
  • Added X,Y,Label command. This creates a single curve in an XY plot and uses entries from the Labels column as point labels. Label column may contain blank entries.
  • XYZSurface command will now interpret a 4th column (if selected) as point labels.
  • Moved Append to existing document menu command to new Options dialog box, which also contains settings for new label features. All settings are stored to the registry and are persistent.
  • Hidden rows are now ignored.
  
  
• Removed, for all practical purposes, the limitation on the number of point labels in a plot. Previous versions were limited to 100 labels. This version is limited to about 15 million labels (2Gb divided by, currently, 140 bytes per label).
   
• Improved the performance of mouse-activated point labels. In previous versions if the labels were closely-spaced, moving the mouse from point-to-point resulted in screen flashing and remnants of old labels left beneath the new label.
   
• If using Calendar date number format (as opposed to Date and Time) then in previous versions DPlot would only show the date in dialog box entries for several different commands (for example a note's anchor point), when it might have been more appropriate to show both the date and time. As a result the fractional part of these numbers would be truncated if you simply opened a dialog box and clicked OK. In this version, if the fractional part of a date is 1 second or greater, DPlot will show both the date and time for Calendar date format in dialog boxes.
   
• Reworked Edit>Combine Curves. Previous versions allowed you to combine the data from one (and only one) curve with that of another curve, and the original curve was deleted. This version allows you to combine 2 or more curves and has an option to preserve the original curves. Modified the CombineCurves macro/DDE command to include a "keep" parameter.
   
• Coefficients presented in the results of Polynomial Curve Fit are now shown with more significant figures. And the default number of points to generate in the fitted curve is now the maximum of 1000 and the number of points in the input. In previous versions the default was the number of points in the input, which confused many users when they didn't get a smooth curve as a result.
   
• The feature of showing coordinates in a popup window when hovering the mouse over a data point for 1/2 second is now an option under Options>General. In previous versions this feature was not optional and might have been an annoyance.
   
• Added Subtract Mean command to the Edit menu for XY plots. This command subtracts the average Y value from all Y values in one or more curves. Added corresponding EditSubtractMean macro/DDE command.
   
• Added new tick mark features to 1D plots (box-and-whisker plots, dot graphs). See Options>Tick Marks.
   
• Lighting of 3D surfaces: In previous versions DPlot polled the printer device driver to find the color resolution of the device, and ignored lighting settings if the bits/pixel value returned was 8 or less (256 colors). However, virtual drivers for PDF files return erroneous information. So even though the device driver was perfectly capable of handling a 24-bit picture, DPlot would draw an unlit 3D surface. In this version DPlot pays attention to the bits/pixel setting only for display monitors and assumes that all other output devices can handle a 24-bit picture correctly.
   
• Bug fix: Last version's fix to eliminate crashes due to integer overflows (related to the tick mark interval being much smaller than the numbers on the axis, usually only a problem with calendar dates) re-introduced a roundoff error on specified extents. You might, for example, specify a lower limit of 2.4 and a tick mark interval of 0.2, but DPlot would reset the lower limit to 2.2.
   
• Bug fix: Last version's change of allowing tick marks on the outside edge of the plot resulted in a bug if Options>Grid Lines or Box>Axes Only was selected. A couple of parameters for this axis type were not initialized correctly so that the numbers along the Y axis were not drawn and tick marks were not drawn until you switched to another axis type and back again.
   

February 26, 2006
Version 2.0.4.0

• DPlot_Start function will now check version numbers of dplotjr.exe and dplot.exe and use DPlot Jr if it meets the minimum version requirement but the full version does not. The minimum version is either the default value set within the DLL (currently 2.0.3.3) or a more recent version that you can specify with the new DPlot_MinVersion function. All previous versions of DPlot_Start always used the full version of DPlot if it could be found, unless DPlot Jr was already running and the full version was not.
   
• Added Tick Marks command to the Options menu to control the placement (inside, outside, or both) and size of tick marks. Previous versions always drew tick marks to the inside of the graph and used a fixed size of 1/2 the height of the font used for numbers and 1/4 of that height for minor tick marks. Added corresponding TickMarks macro/DDE command.
   
• For XY plots, when using Edit>Edit Data you may now use the mouse to edit existing points or add new points. Also, changes to the data are now automatically reflected in the graph. Taken together, these two new features enable you to "draw" a plot with your mouse. One consequence of this change is that you cannot Cancel the operation unless Undo is enabled. "Snap mouse" option rounds mouse-picked values to "nice" numbers, based on the current tick mark interval. Also added a Sort button, which sorts the data in ascending X order.
   
• Added "Font..." menu item to the right-click menu for numbers along the coordinate axes.
   
• Added "X axis increases left-to-right" option for Grain Size Distribution plots.
   
• File>Append works more consistently with DPlot files. You can now append multiple DPlot files to an existing plot. Settings within the appended plot which affect the entire plot (scaling, extents, tick mark intervals, title lines and axis labels, etc.) are ignored.
   
• Added NORMRAND function for Y=f(X) and other commands that generate data from an equation. NORMRAND returns a normally-distributed random number from a distribution with a specified mean and standard deviation.
   
• Better error reporting on image export options (BMP, GIF, etc.). Previous versions simply failed when an error was encountered, with no error message.
   
• When panning a zoomed plot, pressing the Ctrl key in combination with the arrow keys now pans the plot by 10% of the normal pan distance. (By default, the pan distance is one half of the plot extents. This fraction can be reset with a SetPanFraction macro command.)
   
• If the crosshair cursor is used, that cursor is now used during a Distance Between Points command. In previous versions the cursor reverted to the default arrow when any dialog box was opened.
   
• Point labels for invisible curves are not drawn.
   
• The Colors dialog for XY plots now includes curve legends in the label rather than the generic Curve 1, Curve2, etc.
   
• Improved the new N1.85 scaling option a bit. Previous version did not allow X values equal to 0. This was simply to avoid math errors and not a physical limitation of the scale.
   
• Changed behavior when opening files from Explorer, the command line, or a FileOpen DDE command. In previous versions a '+' symbol was always interpreted as a delineator between filenames, so that you could specify multiple files to open on the command line. This is a remnant from DOS 8.3 filenames, when a '+' was not a legal filename character. The problem with this operation is that filenames containing a '+' character could not be opened from Explorer or any of the previously-mentioned methods. In this version, to use a '+' symbol to specify multiple files all filenames must have an extension. Likewise, you cannot open a file from Explorer if the filename contains a '.' character preceding any '+' character.
   
• Bug fix: Fairly recent addition of N1.85 scaling resulted in changes in the X axis scaling that broke rotated 1D plots (box-and-whisker plots or dot graphs).
   
• Bug fix: If opening a file from Explorer with "Open" or "Open with", if DPlot was already open and a document was open, then the new document would inherit inappropriate properties of the first document. In most cases this was merely an annoyance, in other cases it might have resulted in a crash.
   
• Bug fix: DPlot failed to read data columns with values greater than the maximum magnitude of a single-precision floating point number about (3.4E+38) either from multiple-column text files or text columns on the Clipboard.
   
• Bug fix: If "Always auto-adjust scale factors on 3D plots" was checked, scale factors saved to DPlot files were ignored.
   
• Bug fix: Image formats saved by DPlot (BMP, GIF, etc., plus bitmaps copied to the clipboard) sometimes included an extra black line along the bottom and/or right sides of the image.
   
• Bug fix: File>Append presented a bogus error message if appending a DPlot file that contained user-specified tick mark intervals.
   
• Bug fix: With new N1.85 scale, a dependent second X axis (for example, used for different units) was scaled incorrectly.
   
• Bug fix: For XY plots with gridlines across the plot and a second X axis related to the primary X axis by an equation, the labels for the second axis were prone to overlap for many unit conversions.
   
• Bug fix: It was possible to cause DPlot to crash if you attempted to plot a curve on a log Y scale when the curve had only 2 points and one of those points had Y=0.
   
• Bug fix: DPlot crashed due to an integer overflow if you selected a tick mark interval smaller than either extent divided by about 2 billion (more precisely, 0x7FFFFFFF). This would commonly be a problem when working with calendar dates and a tick mark interval of 1 second or smaller.
   
• Bug fix: The default extents on XY plots often cut off portions of the data, if the magnitude of the X or Y values was much larger than the default tick mark interval
   
• Bug fix: Edit>Edit Data did not use a sufficient number of significant figures in some cases.
   
• Bug fix: Edit>Copy Data Values did not use a sufficient number of significant figures for XY plots with date/time groups on the X axis.
   

February 11, 2006
Version 2.0.3.3

• Added N1.85 Hydraulic graph scaling. The X axis is proportional to X raised to the 1.85 power; Y axis is linear.
   
• Added Engineer number format. This is identical to Powers of 10, with the exception that exponents will always be multiples of 3.
   
• Added USDA Soil Classification option for triangle plots.
   
• Popup tooltip-like windows showing coordinates that were previously only available for XY plots are now shown in 2D views of 3D data.
   
• Use 1000 separator is now specific to each axis.
   
• Bug fix: Previous versions did not save enough significant figures to correctly store date/time groups for note locations and point label locations. Several dialogs did not allow input of dates and/or times when those formats would have been appropriate. And other dialogs that did allow input of date/time groups used text boxes and/or static text controls that were too small to show the entire entry.
   
• Bug fix: Corrected a bug with saving 'SymbolCycleColors' keyword to DPlot files.
   
• Bug fix: Corrected a bug in the number formatting routine that might have caused a crash if you either a) used any $ text shortcuts (e.g. $YMAX) or b) used the "Find Intersections" menu command.
   

January 27, 2006
Version 2.0.2.7

• Added better support for PlotMetrics and PlotMetricsEx "request" items (retrieved with a call to DPlot_Request in DPLOTLIB.DLL.
   
• You can now right-click on the numbers along any axis of an XY plot to set the plot extents.
   
• Improved interpretation of dates and times entered in text boxes of various dialogs. In previous versions, dates or times were only accepted as input if the corresponding axis used date or time formatting. This was a minor problem if, for example, you were creating a plot from scratch and attempting to enter dates using the Edit Data input. In this release dates and/or times may be entered regardless of whether the corresponding number format is used. DPlot also does a slightly better job of determining the order of the month, day, and year in a date input.
   
• Extents and tick mark selection dialog for 3D plots now mimics the XY plot version: Extents can be specified with dates and simple equations; tick marks for date scales can be specified in days, months, years, etc.
   
• Improved default tick mark selection for 3D plots.
   
• Added an option for tripartite plots to draw acceleration and displacement grid lines for 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, and 9 times a power of 10.
   
• Bug fix: Several plot parameters were incorrectly initialized during a macro ForFilesIn loop. In particular the number of symbols used in each legend entry was set to 0 rather than the default 2 and the number of significant figures displayed was set to 0 (meaning values along each axis were rounded to integers). This problem existed only in ForFilesIn loops in which the documents were opened and closed within the loop, for example in a loop to save all DPlot files as images.
   
• Bug fix: Bitmaps created when saving image files (JPEG, PNG, etc.) were not freed under some circumstances. This might have led to a failure to save subsequent image files, particularly when attempted in a ForFilesIn macro loop.
   
• Bug fix: Change in previous version allowing British sieve sizes on a Grain Size Distribution plot contained a bug which might have caused DPlot to crash under some circumstances.
   
• When opening a 3-column text file as a surface plot, if the triangulation on this data failed (such that a MessageBox with "All points are collinear." was displayed), DPlot failed to clean up all of the data structures used for a surface plot. This bug might have then led to a crash when subsequently opening another file.
   
• Bug fix: New Excel Add-In feature, "Append to active document", erroneously created an extra curve with 0 points on XY plots.
   
• Bug fix: Function parser included in the last several releases neglected to include acosh, asinh, and atanh functions.
   
• Bug fix: Lecroy WavePro file import filter did not properly handle 1-byte data records. These records were assumed to be unsigned bytes (0 to 255) rather than the correct signed bytes (-128 to 127).