All good points.  Clearly the use case I'm reacting to at the moment is the demo/working-with-in-process-model issue, but having a slick way to chart final-data-collection is very handy too.

A checkbox could be the quickest, easiest option to facilitate both usages.

I would envision a dialogue box that lets you manually specify the image dimensions/proportions, so users who are exporting PDFs or manually tiling charts across the screen and want them to be the same size, etc, have that option.  That'd be a bit more work though -- a checkbox would have the same effect.

IMO the default behavior ought to be scale-on-drag & fill whole window.  You'd also need a mechanism to auto-adjust text size.

Siggy


On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 12:37 PM, Chris Hollander <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
I'll see your chart and raise you a crazy ggplot2 graph!

Having the option for publication quality charts is a good idea, since realistically not everyone knows how to use other software. What about a checkbox that would enable resizing? Then by default the system would work as it does now, but if you click the box you'd get a resizable border on the plot and could drag it as you will. 


On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 12:19 PM, Sean Luke <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
On Apr 23, 2013, at 12:11 PM, Chris Hollander wrote:

> Are using chat windows directly from mason really the best idea for publications? I would think they're much better off for giving demonstrations and exploring the model. If you want to graph information, wouldn't you be better off just writing the data you want to a file, and then using a "real" plotting system to make the graphs? (Like gnuplot, R with ggplot2, or matplotlib/matlab, etc)

Actually, the chart mechanism was specifically developed to make good looking charts!  That's why it outputs PDF, provides dashing and width in addition to color, and has a white background.  Behold:




So again, I'm cool with changing the default behavior perhaps, but I need to know what you want the default behavior to be *exactly*.

Sean




--

Ph.D student in Computer Science
George Mason University
http://mason.gmu.edu/~escott8/