As stated in the subject I have developed a little function to create a simple callout to use as a pinpoint tool in a XY Plot Region graph.
It cames after several weeks of analyzing the history of the development of the XY Plot plugin from UNI; all this in the hope of understanding better how to use it and to minimize the possibility to get lost in the examples that I see recently published in the forum .

During the development of this small program there have been several issues to address and strange behaviours ( at least for me ) that have experienced but this will be the subject of a future mail (probably).

In the attached file have summarized many info's too distribuited in the posts and in the Martin's Reference Book so there is a little bit of documentation redundancy and I apologize in advance for this.
Moreover during the usage of the Shape functions I have had the illusion to understand something and I have written this down in some comments , I will be more than pleased if you can correct them if you feel that some of them are not correct .
The aim is always that of learning something more every day so thanks in advance for this .

There is however one thing that make me wonder and I would like to ask to UNI or anyone that is able to answer and is why it is not possible to place the output of a Shape function in the XY Plot placeholder directly but it is needed to place it in a (double ?) nested matrix otherwise the XY Plot Interpreter ( sorry fot the inappropriate name of the routine that I guess parse the string(s) of command written there ) is not able to understand correctly the plot request.


Best regards

Franco


XYPlot_Draw shapes Callout_.sm (203kb) downloaded 28 time(s).

Uni thank you for your feedback, unlukily I haven't undertood it completely but this is a probrem due to my ignorance about lists and their usage .
I am accustomed to the equation list= someting with curly bracket at the beginning , so I have erroneusly thought to something else for what concern the shape routine/function input structure.
I'll study better Martin's Reference book about the list topic and hopefully will understand better what is explained in your post.

Thanks again and keep up the good work.
Best Regards

Franco

P.S. Off-Topic question , but why all the avatar pictures have disappeared , exept a few ones ? and it is not possible to restore them back.

An example of using a set of objects. As you can see, when used this way, the nested matrices are not so noticeable.

Very interesting these examples, mainly the last one that shed further light on the internal workings of the XY Plot plugin ( the polyline function ).

Best Regards

Franco

Determining the size of the rectangle in which the text will be inscribed is quite a difficult task, since its size depends not only on the font parameters. For a monospace font, this procedure may be simpler, but not much. I can’t give any formula, since a special function is used to measure the size of the text in c# - MeasureString. Obtaining size data is done dynamically for each specific case when drawing.

The ability to display text was added by analogy with the built-in component and I will not expand this function any further to maintain compatibility. There are already some differences in drawing that I need to fix.

Before inventing the bike, it is always worth it to first see how it is done in others. If I find similar solutions, I will add them by analogy.

Yes Oscar, I was thinking about what was shown in the Alvaro's post but now in this last post of him here (Alvaro is really a force of nature ) there is another approach with some monospaced bitmap font scalable .

I need to study it in detail because due to my ignorance I do not undertand the whole method ( even if looks to me that he transit trough the creation of an image of what need to be typed on the plot and images are zoomable in XY Plot so this is a workaround to the zooming problem that we are trying to address) .
My original desire was to create callauts just with one font to semplify the project and I like a lot the Arial one ..but I don't know how to create a Arial Monospaced font with the Alvaro's method so I will try to use the Franklin font that is however a clean and elegant one and see if I am able to merge it in the other funtions that I have tried to develop by myself.

Best regards

Franco

Indeed, Oscar describes the process accurately. He also produces better images than I did. Excel does not allow saving images directly, and looks like he uses a better intermediate program, I had not paid attention to that.

I store the image in a variable until there is a way to obtain the matrix directly from an embedded image in SMath, avoiding the use of external files.

The picture size is (6*20+1) x (16*14+1) . The plus one line and column is because of the border line of the Excel grid. You can leave it or remove it from the matrix, it has no influence.

Using bitmaps to go from a proportional font to a monospaced one is not my invention, there was a time when programmers did not like to count variable lengths of text and when users got bored of always using the same fonts, so this trick was used. It is actually still in use, I think.

There is a trick in the algorithm: The space character is not in the character list, and any character that is not found is written as a space, the zero character.

Something I have wanted to do with images, but I haven't been able to, is to rotate them, its application in this case would be to write text at an angle.

Best regards.
Alvaro.

Edited by user 17 December 2024 04:13:26(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

Hi Alvaro,Oscar,

sorry for disturbing you but I would like to know if it is possible to draw the string of BMP text on the XY Plot Plugin but with a transparent background, as you can imagine going ahead with the project of drawing Callouts rise the problem to have a text that allows to see the background graph or whatsever is in the background otherwise I guess that we lose clarity in what we highlight through the Callout.
I know that BMP doesn't allow a transparent channel ( or not ? ) we should move probably to a PNG format and probably I would be able to save in PNG with a transparent background the font matrix that now are in BNP format but the possibility of the XY Plot Plugin will allow to draw/show images/picture in PNG format with transparency ?
I hope I was able to describe the problem decently.
Thanks in advance for your help and best regards.

Franco

P.S:Herewith we see that the text "Starting point" hide a little bit the starting of the line segment , obviously I have inverted the display order sequence despite the original Alvaro's file to show this.

Hi. A workaround.



XYPlot - Scalable monospaced bitmapped fonts COLOR.sm (2,226kb) downloaded 4 time(s).

Best regards.
Alvaro.