Version 4.7

Post date: Apr 24, 2015 5:56:45 PM

Version 4.7.3, 08 October 2015. 

• • Support for editing properties of multiply-selected objects. In previous versions of Figure Composer, whenever you selected more than one object in the figure, the Property Editor was hidden because you could not edit more than one object at the same time. However, as of V4.7.3, if all of the objects in the selection are of the same type, the editor remains visible, and any property changes you make within that editor are applied to ALL of the objects in the selection. The multi-object property edit is performed as an atomic reversible operation, so it can be "undone" and "redone" like any other edit.

  • Support for laying out multi-graph figures using put2fyp().  Two new operations are available: (1) the 'figure' command creates an empty FypML figure of a specified size and saves it to file; (2) the 'addgraph' command converts an axes object in an open Matlab figure to a FypML graph node, then inserts that graph into an existing FypML figure at a specified size and location.

  • When Figure Composer or DataNav Builder launches under Linux or Mac OS X, the splash screen now includes a simple progress bar to provide visual feedback while the application is loading. The feature is not supported under Windows.

Version 4.7.2, 13 August 2015.

• • Support for axial and radial gradients. You can now specify three kinds of background fills -- uniform single-color (including transparent), axial gradient, and radial gradient -- for four different graphic objects: shape, textbox, image, and the figure itself. The gradient fills depend on the geometry of the target object; by design, one "cycle" of the gradient spans the object's bounding box. Prior to this change, a closed shape was filled IAW its fillColor style, which only supports a solid-color fill, and the centered label had to be painted in the strokeColor. Now, the shape is filled IAW the new background fill property, stroked IAW its stroke styling as before, and the centered label is painted IAW the fillColor style. This change required a FypML schema update, and care is taken to ensure that existing figures are unaffected.

  • New feature: Staircase plot. Added an additional display mode to the trace node: staircase. This is a simple variation on the polyline mode in which consecutive data points are connected by a sample-and-hold "step" instead of a straight line. The FIG-to-FypML import engine was updated to convert a plot object generated by the Matlab stairs() function to a trace node configured in the staircase display mode.

• New feature: Resize a shape independently in horizontal and vertical dimensions. The shape node's size attribute has been replaced by separate width and height properties so that you can scale the shape differently in the two dimensions. The mouse-drag interaction that resizes a shape node on the figure canvas has been updated accordingly. 

  • FypML schema version number = 20.

  • IMPORTANT: Recommend upgrading your system to Java 7 or better, particularly on Mac OS X. I've noticed significant performance improvements under the latest Oracle Java 7 vs the last Apple Java 6 release (Apple stopped maintaining its own proprietary Java version several years ago). With respect to this release, I have observed that figures containing gradient fills render VERY SLOWLY in the Apple Java 6 runtime, while rendering is essentially instantaneous in the Oracle Java 7 runtime.

Version 4.7.1, 18 June 2015. 

• • (22 Jun 2015) Mac OS X only: In order to upgrade to Java 8 (the latest Java runtime version), users must install the runtime implementation from Oracle, since Apple no longer maintains its own Java implementation. However, the "application bundle" structure for an Oracle Java app is not compatible with an Apple Java app. Therefore, it was necessary to create separate distribution archives for Mac OSX -- one compatible with Apple Java (version 6 only), and one compatible with Oracle Java (version 7 and higher).

  • New feature in FC: Area charts. This simple new data presentation node renders a small collection of 2D data sets as a traditional stacked area chart. Like a bar plot, a unique color and label are assigned to each data group in the area chart. The FIG-to-FypML import engine and the Matlab utility matfig2fyp() were both updated to support importing Matlab area charts into FC.

  • New feature in FC: Pie charts. The pie element renders a list of values as a pie chart in a polar graph context. Up to 20 values will be represented, each as a slice in the pie. The angular extent of the slice for datum D is 360*D/T, where T is the sum of the data (NaN and non-positive values are treated as 0). As with bar and area charts, you can set the color and label assigned to each "slice"; you can also select one or more slices to be displaced radially from the chart origin. The FIG-to-FypML import engine and the Matlab utility matfig2fyp() were both updated to support importing Matlab area charts into FC.

  • The root figure's note property now accepts the tab character, so you can present information in a tabulated format.

  • Tweaked layout of the file chooser dialog so that both the file selection panel on the left and the preview panel on the right make good use of the additional H/V space when the dialog is resized.

  • Added two split-pane dividers to Workspace Browser so that user can adjust the amount of vertical space allotted to the preview panel and the figure description. Also, the text area displaying the figure description is hidden whenever there is no description, leaving more space for the preview canvas.

  • Minor GUI issue: On Linux, the figure note was hard to read in the scrolled text area at the bottom of the Workspace Browser -- because the text was almost the same color as the background. Fix: This was because the text area was disabled. It is now enabled, but remains "read-only".

  • Bug fixed: Under certain situations, exporting a figure to JPEG format would fail entirely ("Metadata components != number of destination bands"), or the resulting JPEG image would have a pink translucent layer.

  • In FC's Print Preview mode, any part of the canvas that is outside the margins or off the page is covered by a translucent gray mask to make it clear what portion of the figure will not be printed (if any).

  • To refresh any changes entered into a multi-line text area -- for text box content, a figure note, or an axis label --, you can now use the keyboard shortcut Shift+Enter instead of pressing the adjacent "refresh" button.

  • Updated DataNav Viewer app to support figures containing area or pie charts.

Version 4.7.0, 11 May 2015. 

• • DataNav Viewer was revised to support the browser history and back/forward button functionality. Since it is a so-called "single-page application", we decided to encode the application's current state in the URL hash ('#') fragment, which is never sent to the server. The contents of the hash fragment are rather strange, but they will allow you to copy the URL from the browser's address bar and send it to a colleague so s/he can view the particular portal content identified by that "stateful link".

  • The Alt+Ctrl+arrow shortcut in Figure Composer for "micro-nudging" the selected graphic objects left, right, up or down was replaced by Alt+Shift+arrow. The former shortcut is reserved in Windows 8 and Linux for OS-specific use.

  • Builder bug fix: After editing an archived figure or a hub navigation view template in the pop-up dialog, the thumbnail canvas on the relevant wizard would be cleared instead of showing the revised figure.

  • Figure Composer bugs fixed: (1) If you edited a node property within a text field in the property editor, then select another node of the same type by clicking on it in the figure navigator tree, the property change was lost.  (2) When a graph contained a heat map with other non-data elements like lines, labels and shapes, the heat map image would obscure the other elements when the figure was exported to PDF, even if the other elements were later in the Z order.

  • FC: It was taking too long to export a figure containing many heat maps to PDF because the heatmap image was prepared at 1000dpi. Changing this to 100dpi, export times were reduced nearly 100-fold without noticeable degradation in the PDF output.

  • Modified put2fyp() to let you change the title of any data presentation node, or the legend label of any bar group in a bar plot node. The presentation node is identified by the ID of its source data set.

  • New FC feature: "Figure Notes". Added the optional note property to the root figure node. The property is edited in a text area on the Figure Properties editor and can contain multiple text lines. It is for author use only and is never rendered. The "figure notes" are included in the "preview" of a figure that appears in the Workspace Browser and the file chooser dialog. Thus, one possible use is to list some details that help distinguish multiple versions of the same figure. New put2fyp() command lets you change the figure notes from Matlab.

  • The Dataset Editor Dialog is now modeless, so it can remain "up" while you work on other aspects of the figure and then return to it as needed. The dialog was also simplified somewhat and its resize behavior improved.

  • Removed the style palette, a little-used or perhaps unused feature. You can still copy the styling of one graphic object and paste it to another; you just won't have a whole palette of recently copied style sets. The style set descriptions in the style palette dialog were not intuitive, making the palette rather obtuse.

  • Added a toolbar button corresponding to the View|Special Characters menu item, which toggles the visibility of the special characters tool dialog.

  • Bug fix in put2fyp(F, 'text', ID, S): Function would throw an error if S was an empty string or cell array. Now, if S is empty, the relevant text content is simply reset to an empty string.

  • NOTE: Since this release modifies the FypML schema, the version was incremented to 19. Prior versions of FC will not be able to open FypML files written by version 4.7.0.