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

[Marcus D. Hanwell]

On Thu, Sep 29, 2011 at 9:15 AM, Eric E. Monson <emonson at cs.duke.edu> wrote:
> Hello Sergey,
>
> I know that vtkChart can not do what you want, and I strongly suspect that the Qt-based charts can't either. (I've actually never seen a charting system that can, so I'm glad you included an example of what you are looking for.)

The vtkChartXY class can handle up to four axes (left, top, right and
bottom). There is nothing stopping you from turning autosize off and
overlaying multiple charts too, giving you many axes but that does not
look like an effective way to visualize data.
>
> 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.

Marcus