GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 600482
feature request- Explicit axis ticks in xy-plot
Last modified: 2015-01-12 10:03:26 UTC
Created attachment 146780 [details] i hope this helps-- i drew the axis ticks on my chart in red. I need the ability to declare explicitly the ticks on my x-axis for a continuous xy-plot. Please see the attached .png image. I am using Gnumeric 1.9.9 in Ubuntu 9.10 x86_64. Cheers and thanks for the great free software!
Your sample use a geometric progression for the tick values, which make sense. Using random values is a bit disputable, IMHO. Anyway, this is not very easy to implement, especially, we must ensure that things are readable. In the sample, the "64" is not clearly separated from its neighbours and should probably be hidden. For now what you can do is: - hide the ticks and labels for the axis, - add drop lines (or mimic the ticks with another series), - add labels manually.
*** Bug 670624 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
A concrete example of this feature request. I study ice cores drilled in polar ice sheet. Sometimes, I plot a proxy recorded in this ice core as a function of the depth in the ice core. But I also want a second axis to show the age of the ice in the ice core (which is not linearly related to the depth).
That might be done with a new series with custom labels, I don't think you need an axis for that. Use depth as x, some arbitrary constant value for y and the age as data labels. That would be really not easy to implement as an axis scale.
Created attachment 291561 [details] .gnumeric file to illustrate the issues when using a serie for manual ticks
I agree using a serie is a workaround, but this is clearly suboptimal for several reasons: - the labels of the serie might be hidden by the legend (see attached example). The layout of the whole chart does not take into account this new axis. - the style of the ticks is different from the other axis (see attached example). You can use a diamond symbol but that does not quite look the same with respect to other axis. - you cannot draw a grid. Right now, when I want to draw n different vertical lines, I add n different y-axes (see attached example). Then your chart hierarchy is difficult to follow and you cannot easily change the style of all the vertical lines at the same time.
OK, I see, but clearly not easy.
Another issue is that you cannot easily add an axis title. You can add a separate axis without any tick/label and add a title to this axis but it does not respect the hierarchy in your chart. For the UI, a possibility would be to have a "manual ticks" object which would be the child of the axis.
It would be better with an axis line than with an axis, imho, except that we can't currently add a title to axis lines.
This problem has been fixed in our software repository. The fix will go into the next software release. Thank you for your bug report. Some words on how things work: * Only axis lines can have custom ticks. * There are two vectors: positions and labels. If only the positions are given, all ticks are major ticks and the labels are built from the given position values and format, if labels are given, the labels are used , and ticks without labels are minor ticks. * adding grid lines to an axis line have an effect only if custom ticks are defined. * the format page only applies to custom ticks labels. * if no custom tick is defined, the axis line will use the same ticks than its parent axis. * Axis lines can't currently have titles (this is probably something that should be implemented, but it is not so easy). For now, you can add an invisible axis at the same position and add a title to this axis.
Dear Jean, thank you very much for your work on this. I will test this new feature as soon as I can.
I tested this feature and it works great. Thanks again.