Anyone using ChartDirector from MBS feel frustrated with it? I swear it seems that it plots stuff arbitrarily. It seems every time I change the resolution on my monitor is draws just a bit differently.
And I’m not sure that Christian knows exactly how it works either. Every example I’ve looked at has magic numbers that get it to work. Very hard to do that in a dynamic display where things move around.
I’m about ready to just get the image and scale it into the canvas. If it happens to look smaller at times I think I can live with that.
I have never used chart director but in code i’ve written from scratch, I use PlotArea to mean the area where you can actually plot data… inside teh axes and it does not include the area where you out the Axes values or label then or draw a plot title.
I would guess that is what it means…
And so the PlotArea is always smaller then the chart area and depends on if you have outside tic marks, what size fonts you for Axis values and how far below the tics they are placed, and if you label the axes with a name and units etc
I place my charts into a container so I can resize them and place them where ever I want on the page. My only issues are that the title doesn’t wrap to two lines, if I provide too many items in the X-Axis it doesn’t cut down how many are displayed, but they write over one another, and the legend is often displayed over the top of the chart. All these are fixable manually in the settings.
Like I said. I was ranting. I finally got some percentage plot area to overall size calculations working that worked okay for all the various screen resolutions. On some resolutions it looks smaller than I’d like but it’s still readable (which was my original problem).
Thanks for letting me rant.
FWIW, another developer sent me a private email with similar complaints with ChartDirector. It does a lot but the documentation doesn’t help much.
I’ve used the ChartDirector plugin a little in the past and have always struggled with the documentation too. I’ve found that searching the ChartDirector forums usually gives lots of answers and Peter Kwan from the company that makes the software is probably one of the most helpful people out there.