I've reedited this question a few times: I've made some good progress!
So, as I understand it, multiplot splits the whole canvas up into equal sized parts as needed. This is a little weird when your different plots have different dimensions, as in my case, but it works. The problem might come in when the graph are supposed to be very close together (e.g. each takes up most of its canvas), but one of them has labels. In that case, it seems the plot with labels must resize to be smaller so everything can fit. That's where I am now.
I see a few options.
make all the plots farther apart-- but I don't want to do that.
somehow make the label not part of the multiplot-- I would totally do this, but I don't know how. It's possible even just the axis tics themselves would be too big, but I can probably deal with that or compromise just that amount on the spacing.
So my question is, how can I put words in a gnuplot graph, completely separately from a plot?
(The picture is also giant, which is unfortunate, it was the only way I could make the formatting work)
Two things:
Multiplot has a convenience mode layout <rows>, <columns> that, as you say, splits the page into equal rectangles. But you do not have to use this convenience mode; you can assign each sub-plot to any arbitrary rectangle on the page, even one that overlaps or is interior to another rectangle. Here is an example from the online demo set that is close to what you show:
Demo of multiple plots with explicit alignment of borders
Placing text anywhere on the page: The set label command allows you to position the text using screen coordinates rather than plot coordinates. For example, to place a single large label centered at the top of a page that contains multiple plots:
set label 1 "This label is positioned independent of all plots"
set label 1 at screen 0.5, screen 0.95 center
set label 1 font "Times,20"
Related
I’m using the mailmerge feature of Gembox.Document to produce reports.
I’m having issues with the sizing of a picture.
I have created a merge field inside a table cell, and I would like the picture to occupy the maximum of the cell size without changing it’s aspect ratio.
For now it’s inserting the picture, but the ratio is all messed up.
I’ve read in the help page that I could put a shape my merge field but after many attempts I don’t know how to do it, when I try to draw the shape in my word template, it doesn’t go inside my merge field.
Can anybody help me with this ? Either to fix the aspect ratio, or how to use the shape…
Cheers
Take a look at the second Merge Pictures example, its input "MergePicturesWithTemplates.docx" file has MergeFields with Shapes inside.
To place a Shape inside a MergeField, draw the shape, set it as "In Line with Text", and drag it inside the field.
Now that you have a shape as a placeholder for your image, you can add switches to MergeField in order to keep the aspect ratio of the merged picture:
\x - resize resulting picture horizontally, keep the template shape's height.
\y - resize resulting picture vertically, keep the template shape's width.
\x \y - resize resulting picture either horizontally or vertically.
To add a switch, press ALT + F9 in MS Word, that will reveal field's code and then write the switch within.
I have a set of pages that look like this:
I have the content in grids with * Heights and Widths so the grid correctly scales when the entire window resizes. I would like the text to resize with the grid. Basically I would like the user to resize from this:
To this:
(preserving white space)
One way to do this would be to wrap the TextBlock in a ViewBox with margins on the right and bottom (for Grid.Row="3") to account for white space. But because I have several pages with different lengths and line counts I would have to set the margin specifically for each page otherwise the text sizes would differ on each page. Is there a better way to do this??
I don't think there is a better way to do this. There are different ways. But, I think it isn't just a matter of opinion that they would not be better.
Ways I can think of.
Render your text offscreen, rendertargetbitmap that so you've got a picture. Change your textblocks on screen to images and stretch them.
Or
Work out the size your text wants to be. Then do some calculation comes up with a different fontsize which is "better". This is a lot easier to write a description of than do.
In my opinion.
A viewbox is easier to implement. Way less error prone than calculations. Will give at least as good results as rendering to a picture.
I just want to add one more solution to the ones suggested by Andy, which is more of a scientific approach and takes a bit of practice to master.
Suppose you have to find a function F, which maps one or more variables to a desired single value. In your case that would be a function F, which takes aspect ratio of the window as input and outputs an appropriate font size.
How can you find such a function?
Well... you don't need to do any math yourself!
First, you need some data to begin with:
1. Resize the window randomly
2. Calculate aspect ration (X)
3. Pick an appropriate font size that looks good enough (Y)
4. Repeat the measurement 7 to 10 times (sorry data scientists)
5. Enter the data in Excel - one column for X and another one for Y
6. Insert a scatter chart
7. Choose the best trendline for your data, but avoid the polynomial one
8. Display the trendline equation and use the expression in your code
Now I should mention the pros and cons of this regression technique.
Pros:
1. It can solve a wide range of tricky problems:
"I use this 3rd party control, but when the text is too long it overlaps the title bar. How to trim it so it doesn't go beyond the top border?. Deadline is coming!"
2. Even if it doesn't solve the problem perfectly, the results are often acceptable
3. It takes minutes to try out unlike spending a day refreshing your math skills
Cons:
1. The biggest problem is that to keep it simple, you often lower the number of
variables by assuming some of them to be constant. In this post I've assumed that
the font family won't change for example, neither the font weight.
2. If any of the assumptions does not hold the final result could be even worse
This technique is fragile, but powerful. Use it as your last weapon and never leave magic expression like
fontSize = (int)(0.76 + 1.2 * aspectRation) without documenting how it came to be.
I'm performing some geographical computations in a grid with squares (i.e. regions). I'm using Delphi, but the logic could probably be applied to C++ too. Let me first explain what I want to do.
The following image is a portion of my grid, which is represented by a two-dimensional array Square that denotes the centre point in each square, and the "movement through the layers":
The green square has an X and Y coordinate of 2, so that is Square[2,2]. The actual coordinates are stored in Square[2,2].Latitude and Square[2,2].Longitude as wel as extra information in e.g. Square[2,2].Info that I use for computations.
Now comes the purpose: I need to do some computations on the surrounding areas. How many of the surrounding areas can be called "neighbours", depends on how many "layers" I have defined. In the image above, I used two of these "layers". That means that when starting from the green cell, I go around it once (blue arrows) and then again in the second layer (red arrows).
Now comes the problem: if I would have started in Square[1,1] (green square) instead of Square[2,2] as in the image below, the second layer (in red) would try to access data on the left side and at the bottom that does not exist (i.e. in the "-1" column and row). See the image below. This problem occurs at all borders of course.
I probably can make exceptions with IF-statements for every scenario, but I was wondering if there are common programming "tricks" that can handle such situations where you try to access data does not exist.
For example, I imagine it would be very handy if I can follow the pattern of the arrows depicted in the first image to access all the neighbouring squares every single time, even if there are non-existing squares. So, looking at the first image, after Square[3,0] you'd go to something like Square[3,-1] etc. and then eventually come back into the "feasible" zone in Square[0,3].
To visit neighborhood, you can use some kind of BFS (breadth-first search).
But for sparse structure (like the last picture shows) it is worth to use some data structure to organize cells in a good way. Perhaps kd-tree is suitable - you add all existing cells in the tree and make range search around given cell to get other cells in its vicinity.
Also look at another spatial data structures (see list at the bottom of kd-tree page).
I'm working on a view that's implementing a multi-column text layout using CoreText (using CTFramesetter).
CoreText usually fills each frame completely, so when I call CTFramesetterCreateFrame with three rects that make up my columns, I get a layout that's similar to the following image:
So the left column is filled completely, the middle column partially and the right column is empty. But instead, I'd like the text to distribute over the three columns so that they take up the least vertical space possible, like in this image:
How to achieve this with CoreText?
I don't mind going low-level here, even drawing each CTRun by hand is an option if necessary.
One idea I came up with would be to create a large frame with the width of a column and then figure out which CTLine to draw in which column. But this has a few limitations:
It would only work if all columns had the same width.
It does not work with clipping paths.
Unfortunately, I'll need to use clipping paths (as in kCTFrameClippingPathsAttributeName) so this idea is out. I could live the fixed column width limitation, though.
Another idea would be to reduce the height until the last frame overflows but that's a pretty brute-force way that surely wastes resources.
(BTW, due to compability requirements the use of TextKit classes like NSTextStorage isn't possible; the resulting view is intended to be used on Mac and iOS, but it needs to work on iOS < 7)
Since there doesn't seem to be a non-expensive way to solve this, here's how I've done it:
I did go with the "reduce the height until the last frame overflows" approach. To reduce the height, I simply have another clipping path (kCTFrameClippingPathsAttributeName) which is a rectangle that fills the bottom of the view to the required height.
The probably most expensive but simple way would have been to increase the rectangle height until finally the text doesn't fit inside the last frame any more.
Instead I've implemented a binary search for that. For my demo app, I usually find the correct height after 8-10 recursions which still is expensive but at least it's pixel-perfect and doesn't rely on any other information other than "did the last frame overflow".
I am using www.responsivegridsystem.com for my columns and here is what I've come up with: ux.stoicdigital.com/#intro-message.
I'd like the list to work like this one: http://doyouimpress.com/#uses-list
The biggest problems are that, above a certain amount of px (can't remember exact), the three column grid is centered, but doesn't LOOK centered due to cell widths, etc. and that below that amount of px (when list is in one-column mode), the off-center problem is even worse.
Again, I realize that this has to do with cell widths, etc. but I can't figure out where to make the changes I need to do the following at both sizes:
Align text and bullets left
Center the list itself on the page
Any advice would be appreciated. Would especially appreciate any details you can give re: changes to make to CSS.
PS: If there is another way to achieve this outside of Responsive Grid System, I'm open to that too.
The text doesn't look centered because it isn't. The container div is centered, but since you align the text to the left its all scewed to the left, just like it'd be scewed to the right if you aligned the text to the right.
You could align the text to the middle, but then your checkbox icons wouldn't be lined up. If you want the text to be centered but still have the icons lined up you need to attach the icons so something else but the text. You could display them as pseudo-elements to the <li>, but the drawback is that there would be varying amounts of space between the text and the icons.
What I'm coming at is basically that you can't center the columns this way (as long as you don't make sure that the text in each <li> is equally wide) - however you can fake it and that's what they do on that site you're referring to.
To fake it, simply give each column div a unique class name (or target them with :nth-child), then move each column manually to make it look like the content is centered. You could give them different width-values (this is what they do in your example), different padding-values or similar. That's entirely up to you.
As for the one-column layout, do something similar where you add a padding-value to push them closer to the center, but obviously use the same value for all column divs.