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das-developers / das2java

The original das2 library. Provides interactive publication-ready 2-D plotting
https://das2.org
GNU Lesser General Public License v3.0
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TCA shortcomings 2021 #9

Open jbfaden opened 3 years ago

jbfaden commented 3 years ago

Chris has a case where he would like to use an ASCII file to label an axis with additional ephemeris ticks (TCA). This is showing a number of shortcomings of the mechanism, which will be enumerated here.

jbfaden commented 3 years ago

(1) There should be a mechanism to override the labels found within the dataset. For example, the DasAxis could have a property tcaLabels which is a string labels delimited by a semicolon. For example, I could specify that the tcaLabels are "X;Y;Z". This would be used near plot-time so that the output can be verified, because there are some TCA sources which change the number of columns as you navigate in time.

jbfaden commented 3 years ago

(2) I wrote an Autoplot script to label the three columns X, Y, and Z, and the labels were not properly positioned horizontally, and the label and value overlapped. 2021-05-27T08-05-30

jbfaden commented 3 years ago

(3) For this case, the first data point in the file starts slightly after 00:00, so the tick's column is blank. If the first point is anywhere within the pixel column, it should be used. I'm pretty sure I've got this fuzzy code in there, but I should verify. 2021-05-27T08-10-36

jbfaden commented 3 years ago

(1) The tick labels can be set explicitly to a list of semicolon-delimited labels. In Das2 this is the tcaLabels and in Autoplot this is ephemerisLabels property of the plot.

cpiker commented 3 years ago

If it's not too much trouble could you post a small image of the GUI controls used to set this? I've been looking around in the plot properties box but haven't found one with the name ephemerisLabels, but I might have just missed it.

jbfaden commented 3 years ago

In Autoplot, you will have to edit the plot properties' ephemerisLabels property. This is bound to the property tcaLabels in the DasAxis object. 20210527_183830

cpiker commented 3 years ago

Thanks! That'll work. In case anyone else stumbles across this thread, here's a way to set the labels for the correlated tick values.

Right click in the area of the associated plot, then select: Plot Properties Dialog > xaxis > controller > dasAxis > tcaLabels

for now anyway. There may be other ways to do this in the future.

jbfaden commented 3 years ago

I'll probably have a button on the "add additional ticks" dialog to explicitly set this. But for now, the setting should be done this way and will be saved in .vap files. (But only future releases will use the property, of course.)