[vtkusers] More than one Y-axis/X-axis range on Charts

[Marcus D. Hanwell]

On Thu, Sep 29, 2011 at 9:59 AM, Marcus D. Hanwell
<marcus.hanwell at kitware.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 29, 2011 at 9:15 AM, Eric E. Monson <emonson at cs.duke.edu> wrote:
>> Maybe this won't be useful for you, but I would strongly suggest putting all of those plots into what's sometimes called "small multiples" or a "trellis chart" rather than trying to have a single chart with that many axes to compare the data. It will let you compare trends between curves without the confusion of trying to decipher which curve is which with so many colors and overlaps.
>>
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_multiple
>> http://www.juiceanalytics.com/writing/better-know-visualization-small-multiples/
>>
>> There is a way to do this with vtkChartXY which is shown in [vtk_source]/Charts/Testing/Cxx/TestPlotMatrix.cxx, but it requires you to turn off autosizing and manually place each chart's bounds in the scene. At one point the developers were thinking about a more flexible system of a grid of plots, but I haven't heard about that for a while, so I suspect it just hasn't been a high enough priority yet.
>>
> It is actually something I am working on, and it will be going into
> ParaView. This will happen pretty soon, but as you stated is not
> actually present in VTK right now. I will try to keep hold off this
> post and let you know once I merge it into VTK.
>
By soon, I meant very soon... This class is still being developed but
a new C++ class is in VTK master as of today - TestChartMatrix.cxx
exercises it. I am adding more, but thought I would share as I wanted
to test it out too.

I will be adding functionality to visualize an array of charts based
on vtkTable columns, along with some selection semantics around
scatter plot matrices. We are also adding GUI to ParaView but that may
take a little longer (hopefully we will have some of the early work in
next week).

Marcus