Requirements

LCCharts requires:

• a version of APL+Win at least equal to v15.0
• the .Net Framework v4.0+

Download

Download the full LCCharts product:

Download »

Description

LC.Charts can be used as an ActiveX from APL programs with ⎕wi or through the use of the delivered ]chart user command.
The idea is to make it ultra simple to display APL data in nice charts.

LC.Charts main characteristics are:

• it is extremely easy to use (i.e. ]chart myVariable)
• it can be used from any workspace even a clear workspace
• it is phenomenally fast (draws a scatter plot with 100000 points in 300 milliseconds!)
• the ]chart command includes 19 options for customization
• the ActiveX includes 31 properties and 3 methods
• it supports a crosshair cursor
• is supports log scale on the Y-axis
• it supports multiple successive zooms without performance degradation
• it supports mouse wheel zooming
• it supports panning
• it supports copying the chart to the Clipboard and pasting in Emails, Word, etc.
• it supports saving the image to various formats (png, emf,gif, jpg, tiff, bmp)
• it supports printing the chart
• it resizes nicely and smoothly as the form is resized

Installation

1. Click the above Download LC.Charts button to download LCChartsSetup.zip
2. Unzip the LCChartsSetup.zip file in any folder
3. Exit all versions of APL+Win loaded on your system (in case you were using a former version of LC.Charts in one of these Sessions)
4. Right click LCChartsSetup.exe, select Properties and if you see an Unblock button at the bottom right of the Properties window, click it!
5. Right click LCChartsSetup.exe and select Run as Administrator
   Answer the various installation prompts to install LC.Charts on your system.
6. When done, load APL and use the following command to set up the LCCharts.sf as your top level User Command file:
        ]ufile {path}\LCCharts
   replacing {path} by the full path name of the folder where you installed LC.Charts
   So, if you installed LC.Charts in the C:\APLWIN15\LCCHARTS folder, you need to use the following command:
        ]ufile C:\APLWIN15\LCCHARTS\LCCharts
   The first LCCHARTS is the folder name and the second one is the User Command File name.

Note: if your User Command Processor is set to use case sensitive commands, you can either:

• either use ]CHART instead of ]chart
• or load the TOOLS\UCMDUTIL APL+Win delivered workspace and run CASELESSCMDS function

Using LC.Charts with the ]chart3d user command

You can use the ]chart user command from any workspace to produce 3D charts from your APL variables, even from an empty clear workspace

Its syntax is:

data must be a vector of numeric vectors.

Here is an example:

LC.Charts includes 10 different types of 3D charts.

3D charts can be animated and rotated using the ]spinit user command.

Look at this page for more 3D chart examples.

Using LC.Charts with the ]chart user command

You can use the ]chart user command from any workspace, even an empty clear workspace

Its syntax is:

data can be an APL variable or an APL expression

Here are some examples (scroll to the bottom of these page to see the corresponding charts):

You can use the ]chart user command detailed documentation by typing:

And, of course, you can use the ]chart user command under program control using ⎕ucmd']chart ...'

Using LC.Charts as an ActiveX object

You first need to create an instance of the ActiveX object:

The C# chart form is not shown by default.

You can then simply use the xData property to send the data you want to plot and use the XShow method to display the form:

So this is very simple.

Of course, you could also have set a number of properties before calling the XShow method to customize your chart (not that, if you set properties after the xData property, you need to call the XRedraw method for your changes to be taken in account):

The available properties, methods and events are:

Recommended Use

It is recommended that you use LC.Charts with the ]chart user command rather than as an ActiveX.

The main reason is that there is much less to type to get your chart on the screen as you want it when using ]chart than when using the ActiveX.

However, to keep the ]chart simple enough, not all the LC.Charts properties have been added as ]chart command options. And over time more properties and methods may be added to the ActiveX and probably not to the ]chart command to keep it simple.

Examples

Here are a series of examples, using LC.Charts:

Simple chart of an APL matrix variable

Adding point symbols (may use: circle, default, square, diamond, hdash, none, plus, square, star, triangle, triangledown, vdash or xcross):

Setting the point symbol size

Smoothing the curves

Using different smoothing tensions (choose between 0=no tension and 1=maximum tension):

Adding point labels

Changing point label orientation (any angle between 0 and 360) and format (use .Net Framework number formats)

Changing the X-Axis and Y-Axis maximum values

You can also change the X-Axis and Y-Axis minimym values with /xmin= and /ymin=

Draw a pie chart

For pie charts, you need to supply a 2-element nested vector with the values and the labels. The /lv option means: make the legend visible.

Draw a bar chart

/ty stands for type of chart.

Draw a side by side bar chart

When supplying a APL matrix variable to the LC.Charts object for drawing, whether as a bar chart or a curve chart, your matrix must contain:

• X-coordinates (abscissas) in the 1st column
• Y-coordinates of the various bars or curves in the other columns.

Scatter plot with Point Labels

Notes: data downloaded from http://data.worldbank.org/topic/climate-change
There seems to be a relation between Mortality under 5 per 1000 capita and the Population Growth!

Zooming more to explore low Population Growth and Low Mortality

Let's zoom in for more details

Zooming even more and using the context menu for maybe printing or copying to clipboard

More examples with real data and with more ]chart options

The delivered LCCHARTS.SF UCMD file includes some data downloaded from the World Bank.

So let's draw some charts

Note the use of the ⍎ prefix in some options: it allows you to get the option value by excuting some APL expression. This makes the ]chart command very flexible and dynamic.

In this chart we used a point symbol of square a point symbol size of 5 pixels, an X-Axis labels angle of 30° and an X-Axis major tick step of 1. Note that the ]chart command chooses by itself what labels to display on the X-Axis.

For example, if we make the chart wider, we get:

and if we make it narrower:

At any time you can query the available choices for some properties:

Animated Graphics

It is easily possible to create animated graphics: it is a perfect way to see how data changes over time.

The WorldDataAnimation function in the LCCHARTS User Command file can do that.

Let's plot 2 data variables against each other and see their evolution from 1962 to 2012:

I have captured 2 frames from the animation: state in year 1969 and state in 2012:

Doing such animated graphs can teach a lot.

Needing little code to display spectacular charts

The above Butterfly APL function uses some maths cartesian equation to draw this nice Butterly with LC.Charts.

Animated Charts

LC.Charts is so fast that you can animate a chart to show the evolution of one or more curves over time and the animation you get is perfectly fluid. The Lissajous APL function below demonstrates how to do this. Of course you won't see the animation on this Web page, but try it when you have downloaded LC.Charts. It is a suprisingly smooth animation!

Enjoy and please Email me a copy of some of the charts you create with LC.Charts!