[vtkusers] Setting axis text label orientation in vtkChartXY

[Steven Chall]

On 7 March 2011 17:25, Eric E. Monson <emonson at cs.duke.edu> wrote:
...
> Regarding the font size and tick spacing, you can get around this problem in a manual way by specifying the tick positions and labels and their font sizes. vtkAxis has SetTickPositions() and SetTickLabels(), both of which internally set Behavior = 2 (CUSTOM), which turns off automatic tick spacing calculations. Then you can use GetLabelProperties() to set the font size to a reasonable one for the image size you want. It's not a very automatic solution, but it gets around the problem.
...

Here's an apparently similar situation:  For the vertical axis in vtkChartXY the default text orientation is vertical.  I'd like to set it to horizontal, i.e., the usual way to place text.  For vtkChartXY *chart, I call:

	chart->GetAxis(vtkAxis::LEFT)->GetTitleProperties()->SetOrientation(90.0); 

which does nothing right now, for any orientation values, although the orientation is apparently actually being set, since:

	double yOr  = chart->GetAxis(vtkAxis::LEFT)->GetTitleProperties()->GetOrientation();

always sets yOr to the expected orientation value, and even though I *think* I'm (inadvertently) following Eric's recommendation for setting Behavior = 2 (CUSTOM) by first doing this (turning off ticks and tick labels by using instantiated but empty vtkDoubleArray *tickPositions and vtkStringArray *tickLabels as args, since chart->GetAxis(vtkAxis::LEFT)->SetNumberOfTicks(0) doesn't seem to do anything, either) :

	chart->GetAxis(vtkAxis::LEFT)->SetTickPositions(tickPositions);
	chart->GetAxis(vtkAxis::LEFT)->SetTickLabels(tickLabels);

Furthermore, this, called right after SetOrientation(...), *does* work:

	chart->GetAxis(vtkAxis::LEFT)->GetTitleProperties()->SetLineOffset(-193);

Now I just noticed that I'm using [GS]etTitleProperties() instead of [GS]etLabelProperties() as in Eric's email, so I replaced all of the former with the latter, and got the same results, with one exception:  ...->SetLineOffset(-193) no longer seems to work, either.

Thanks for any suggestions you may have.

Steve

-Steve Chall
 Senior Research Software Developer
 Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI)
 Phone: 919-681-9639
 Email: stevec at renci.org