News archive
SVGGraph 2.19.1
Version 2.19.1 of SVGGraph is a quick bugfix release, fixing one clear bug, some behaviour that was a bit inconsistent, and adding in a new callback option that should really have been there before.
The bugfix is to the stacked and grouped bar graph. Depending on the values in the graph it could calculate the height of the bars incorrectly, meaning that the automatic axis scale selection would chop off the tops of some bars. This version fixes that calculation error.
The inconsistent behaviour was in the structured_data option,
which can best be described by a table:
When is structured data enabled?
structure not set |
structure present |
|
structured_data not set | off | on |
structured_data = TRUE | on | on |
structured_data = FALSE | off | off |
SVGGraph 2.19
The main change in version 2.19 of SVGGraph is the addition of a Histogram graph type. I haven't considered adding one until now because I figured people could work out how to do it for themselves and use one of the existing bar graph classes. I've changed my mind - histograms actually work quite differently to bar graphs, so I've produced these two graphs to demonstrate the difference.
The example above is a standard BarGraph displaying the current sizes of the
PHP files in the SVGGraph library. There are a couple of fairly large files and
quite a few smaller files. I've used a simple associative array to pass the file
sizes to SVGGraph. (The actual values might have changed a bit since I generated
them using ls and awk.)
TagCanvas 2.7
TagCanvas 2.7 adds a few simple options, cleans up the touchscreen controls and fixes a couple of little bugs. Here's an example cloud:
The first thing you are likely to notice about this cloud is the unusual shape - TagCanvas now supports using your own custom callback function to define the shape of the cloud. I added this because Peter Petrov has added a load of interesting shapes to his WordPress plugin and I wanted to make it easier to use other shapes without hardcoding them into the TagCanvas script. There is no new option for this, just provide the name of your function to the “shape” option. There is some documentation and another example on the TagCanvas shapes page.
The list of links used by TagCanvas to draw the cloud above only contains four links. Four tags would not show off the custom shape very well, which is where the new options come in handy. “minTags” and “repeatTags” repeat the list of links to create extra tags in the cloud. “repeatTags” repeats the list a specified number of times, while “minTags” specifies a minimum number of tags, repeating the list as many times as required to reach that number. The options are limited to prevent creating vast numbers of tags, but they should allow for some quite large clouds.
JPEG Saver 4.14
JPEG Saver 4.14 doesn't contain anything truly amazing, but it does have a new item for adding to the display: an analog clock. I first played with an analog clock item back in 2010, drawing the hands as Direct3D meshes. It worked, but it looked awful so I shelved the code. The analog clock in version 4.14 works the same way that the text clock does - drawing to an off-screen bitmap and then pasting it on top. It looks a lot better and makes it easier to preview the clock in the item configuration dialog.
I thought about adding a shadow option to the analog clock, but then I realised it was already easy enough to do using JPEG Saver's items list. Set up your clock the way you want it to look then create a copy, set the colour of the copy to grey (or whatever colour you want the shadow to be), change the offset by a few pixels and then drag the copy above the original clock in the items list. Items are drawn in the order they appear in the list, so the shadow should be above the main clock to be drawn first.
This version also adds some extra format tokens for the “Image info” item, for displaying some properties that can be updated in Windows Explorer. These are the title, subject, keywords (or tags), comments and author. The properties are actually stored in the Exif metadata, but are not part of the Exif standard (which is why I hadn't thought to include them before).
SVGGraph 2.18
In previous versions of SVGGraph there were labels for some bars and labels for pie slices, but that was about it. They used different code, had different option names, and supported different styles and things. Version 2.18 attempts to bring the labels together, support labelling all the data items, and provide more options for what the labels look like.
This example StackedBarGraph shows some of the new features. The labels are
displayed using a data_label_type of “bubble”, with the
data_label_filter option used to only create 1 in 3 labels for
the second dataset and all labels for the first. What do you mean, you
can't see the labels for the first dataset?
You can't see the labels for the first dataset because the
data_label_fade_in_speed and data_label_fade_out_speed
are both set to allow the labels to fade in and out, and the
data_label_click option is set to array('hide','show').
This hides the labels of the first dataset and shows the labels of the second from
the start, but they are all still there.