Plot Formatting
System dynamics program with additional features for economics
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#590 Plot Formatting
This is a candidate for early improvements after the first release. The right hand end of plots being blank, and the number of displaying tick marks being different to what the user enters, will I think annoy users. You can address the first problem for date-based x-axis with bounds, but there's no solution to text-based x-axis.
Also, when I used Mathcad, I did calculations to work out the best combo for starting point, ending point, and tick marks. The formula for the number of ticks was (Start-End)/Desired width=Ticks, and of course I'd choose the Start and End so that they were both significant (decades or half-decades for short-term economic stuff) and resulted in whole numbers for tick marks. It also worked for the Y-axes.
If we could implement something like that in our plots, we'd be ahead of Excel where it's still guesswork (they don't even give you dates as the dimension of the axis, but numbers derived from the 1970 rule), and maybe even Tableau etc where I think fine tuning like that is taken out of the users hands (you get the frequency of ticks the program thinks you need--which is pretty much what we're doing now too
It's basically not as simple as you suggest (I'm not suggesting what we have is optimal, mind you).
Tick marks need to be on integral boundaries, otherwise they look goddamn awful, so the user entered value is more of an upper bound. The right hand end of plots being blank has to do with Minsky simulations - you need the blank space to see data being updated. That is controlled by setting the right hand side of the plot, so the user does have control over this.
That makes sense for Minsky; for Ravel we might need to fine-tune it (with applicability to text-x-axes as well as time) so that the user can control how many non-data-filled divisions there are.
All for the future anyway; it does belong in the backlog.