Search
Ploticus >
Scripts >
Linear
Standard linear numeric scale.
Numeric values may be any mixture of integer or floating point
(exponential/scientific notation e.g. 4.336e11 and 4.336e-27 is supported).
Linear scaling is used for plotting continuous numeric data;
it may also be used with undefined series, such as lineplots
when no X value is present in the data.
Display of numerics is often controlled using a
printf-spec
Log
Logarithmic numeric scale.
Numeric values may be any mixture of integer or floating point
(exponential/scientific notation is supported for large magnitude numbers).
Also available is log+1 scaling, which is similar to log
but uses log( value+1 ). This is useful for log-characteristic data
that can include values at or near 0.0.
If using log scaling along with autorange, and if values
of 0.0 are found, log+1 scaling will automatically be used.
Note: the proc axis stubcull attribute may be useful in
eliminating colliding stubs when rendering log axes.
Categories
Positioning using categorical bins rather than a continuous scale.
The categories themselves are alphanumeric labels.
This scaletype is often useful in positioning bars, rangebars, etc.
Category names generally are short (less than 40 chars long); they
may contain embedded whitespace but this may be problematic if a
category name will be used as a
plotvalue or locvalue.
In scripts, categories may be defined using
proc categories
before invoking proc areadef, or from within
proc areadef.
Date
Allows date information to be plotted directly. A number of
date notations
(including year/month and quarter year notations)
are supported for plotting and date arithmetic.
It is possible to omit weekends if desired - see omitweekends
and
proc settings.
Dates may be displayed in
any of the supported date arithmetic formats,
or in a number of additional
display formats
The basic date unit is always a day, regardless
of which notation is in use. Stub and tic increments
may be expressed in months or years, if desired.
Time
Allows date information to be plotted directly. Several
time notations
are supported for plotting and time arithmetic.
Times may be displayed in any of the supported time arithmetic formats.
The basic time unit is a minute.
Datetime
Allows time information to be plotted across multiple days.
Datetime data items contain a date and a time connected by a certain character,
by default a dot (.). The connecting character can be set via
proc settings
or your
config file;
note that ISO8601 uses a T as the connecting character.
If your data has the date and time in two separate fields,
script writers can use the proc getdata filter attribute to concatenate them
(with a connecting character) into one field.
The date and (clock) time formats may be any of those supported for
plotting and arithmetic.
For example, if your datetime fields are like this:
22Aug1999.16:44 you would specify the datetime
format as ddMmmyyyy.hh:mm.
Display format is the same as above, except that the date
component or the time component may be omitted if desired.
The basic datetime unit is a day.
A script example of datetime scaling is in
hitcount
Datetime with time windowing
Sometimes it is desirable to show only portions of each day, when showing
the entire 24 hour day would be too much. Examples of this include a work
day or a trading day. datetime scaling allows you to do this- you can
indicate the time range for each day at the end of the datetime keyword.
For example:
datetime9-17
would show only the hours from 9:00 to 17:00 for each day.
Rules: Only whole hours may be used in the time window definition.
Time values that are outside the
defined time window will be displayed at the time window boundary and a warning will be
issued. The areadef range must contain time components that are within the
time window range. Incremental axis labels in day, hour, or minutes units may be used.
The end of one day and the beginning of the next day happen at the same point, and
the next day stub takes presidence.
A script example of datetime scaling with time window is in
hitcount3
