Widgets

A document and its graphs are built up from widgets. These widgets can often by placed within each other, depending on the type of the widget. A widget has children, those widgets placed within it, and its parent. The widgets have a number of different settings which modify their behaviour. These include the font to be used, the line thickness, and whether an axis is logarithmic. In addition they have actions, which perform some sort of activity on the widget or its children, like "fit" for a fit widget.

In the command line interface, widgets are located with a "path", like a file in Unix or Windows. These can be relative to the current widget (do not start with a slash), or absolute (do not start with a slash). Examples of paths include, "/page1/graph1/x", "x" and ".".

Widget types

Document

All other widgets sit within a document.A document can contain pages. In addition it contains a setting giving the page size for the document.

Page

An individual page in a document. One or more graphs, grids or shapes can be placed within a page.

Graph

A graph contains plotted data and axes. Graphs can be placed on a page, or within a grid. There are formatting settings for the border and fill of the graph. It also has a margin, which specifies how far away from the edge of its parent widget to plot the body of the graph. A graph can contain several axes (usually two), at any position on the plot.

In addition a graph can use axes defined in parent widgets, shared with other graphs. More than one graph can be placed within in a page. The margins can be adjusted so that they lie within or besides each other.

Grid

A grid contains one or more graphs. A grid plots graphs in a gridlike fashion. You can specify the number of rows and columns, and the plots are automatically replotted in the chosen arrangement. A grid can contain graphs or axes. If an axis is placed in a grid, it can be shared by the graphs in the grid.

Axis

An axis gives the scale for plotting data. An axis translates the coordinates of the data to the screen. An axis can be linear or logarithmic, it can have fixed endpoints, or can automatically get them from the plotted data. It also has settings for the axis labels and lines, tick labels, and major and minor tick marks. An axis may be "horizontal" or "vertical" and can appear anywhere on its parent graph or grid. If an axis appears within a grid, then it can be shared by all the graphs which are contained within the grid.

Plotting widgets

There are several types of plotting widgets which plot data or add other things on a graph. Plotters typically take an axis as a setting, which is the axis used to plot the data on the graph (default x and y).