SoftGraph by David Durkee The purpose of this documentation is to familiarize you with the SoftGraphgraphing system. It will take you through a tutorial covering all the features of the system and then present a reference section showing the command characters associated with each program within the system. To move through the tutorial, use the arrow keys to scroll line by line and the greater than and less than signsto move page by page. To jump to the beginning or end, use control-B and control-E. Control-P will sent the wholetutorial to a printer in slot 1. Finally, pressing escape will get you back to the SoftGraph menu. From time to time, this documentation will ask you to give SoftGraph some input. If it tells you to"enter" something, that means type it inand hit return. If it says to press a key, press only that key; return will not be necessary. FIRST THINGS FIRST We realize that you won't be able to try these things out as you're reading them on the screen unless you have two computers. If you have a printer in your system, it is a good idea to print yourself a copy of this tutorial. If you don't have a printer, read the tutorial, try to get the idea of how the system is integrated, and copy the reference section at the end onto a piece of paper. The first thing to do is boot the disk. Although the programs in SoftGraphare separate Applesoft files, totally accessible by means of the LOAD and RUN commands of DOS, they may not operate correctly unless you run them through the system menu. If you have already booted DOS from another disk, you will be able to start SoftGraph by entering RUN SOFTGRAPH, but it is better to boot the disk so that anything that is already in memory won't interfere with SoftGraph. THE MENU After SoftGraph finishes loading the shape tables and machine language subroutines necessary to run the system,it gives you the system menu. Just as all roads once led to Rome, all programsin SoftGraph lead to the menu. This is the structure of the system: SoftGraph ! v ___________ ! !<----> Pie Data <----->! Main Menu ! Chart Editor ! ^ ! ! ! !<--> Bar/Line ! ! ! Chart ! v ! ! Disk Menu ! !___________! Let's go first to the disk menu, which is actually a part of the Menu program. Do this by entering the number in the main menu next to the disk menu option. Remember, that means to type thenumber and press return. All numbered menus in the system expect this kind of input. The disk menu allows you to catalogthe disk and load and save data and picture files. It also allows you to seethe hi-res screen. If you select that option at this point you will see some fascinating garbage. That is because there is no picture in memory. Hit any key to return. We'll get a picture in there soon enough. If you catalog the disk you will see a file called D.PIE SAMPLER. Using the load-a-data-file option, load this file. The D. prefix tells you that the file contains SoftGraph data. A similar prefic, C., is used to denote files thatcontain entire charts. The load and saveoptions in the disk menu automatically put in the correct prefix, so all you have to type is PIE SAMPLER. For now, don't bother entering any slot or drive values. Later, if you havea second disk drive, you might want to use it for data storage; then you'll usethose parameters. THE DATA EDITOR Okay, now go back to the main menu and select Data Editor. This program will allow you to see and edit all of the data in the file you just loaded. The first thing it asks you is if you want to clear the data. The question appears on the bottom line of the screen. Press the N key to answer no. There are a lot of yes or no questions in the system, most of them in the Data Editor. All of them can be answered by pressing Y or N. Now you'll see a blinking cursor near the upper right corner of the screen. The cursor is in one of ninety cells which are arranged in a 5 by 18 array. Each cell is an area of text one character high and eight characters in length. Since there is a word in the cell, the cursor appears at the end of the word. You can delete that word by using the left arrow until the cell is empty and replace it by typing somethingelse in. If you have an Apple IIe, be sure that the caps lock key is down. What you type here is designed to find its way onto the hi-res screen, and SoftGraph has no provision for lower case letters on the graphic screen. You can move the cursor to other cells by using the control key and I,J,K, and M. For instance, to move the cursor down, you type what is called a control-M. That is, hold down the control key and press the M key. Remember that procedure for using the control key; you'll be using it a lot inSoftGraph. In addition, the return key will move the cursor down and the right arrow will move it right without the help of the control key. Experiment with moving the cursor. You will notice that when you try to move it off the screen, it reappears on the other side. Now move the cursor to one of the blank cells and type something in. If you make a mistake, you can use the right arrow to erase. If you try to enter more than eight characters in a cell, the computer will beep to warn youthat the last character wasn't accepted. Look at the way the data is laid out on the screen. On the left is a listof words. These are the labels that willtell the meaning of each slice of the pie. Note that they cross the border between cells. That is because Pie Chartallows you to use two cells for each label. The Bar/Line Chart program only reads one cell for each label. To enter the label into two cells, you simply type the label in the first cell until the bell rings, press control-K, then continue in the next cell, starting at the character that caused the bell to ring. Pie Chart can only chart one columnof data at a time. To keep track of which column holds what data, and to tell Pie Chart what to title the graph, we enter legends in four special cells at the top of the screen. These cells are special for two reasons. They cannotbe reached through normal cursor movement, and they each have sixteen characters, eight on top and eight underneath. Nevertheless, legends are entered and read as single sixteen character strings. To enter legends, press control-L. A prompt will appear on the bottom of the screen for legend one along with a white bar to indicate how many characters you can enter. If you don't want to change legend one, hit return tomove on to the next one. If you do type something in, it will replace the old legend entirely, even if the old one waslonger. There are some other features of the Data Editor that you should learn, but for now we're going to take a look at Pie Chart. Press control-Q and answerY when it asks you if you want to quit to menu. PIE CHART When the menu comes up, go to the disk menu and load the data file PIE SAMPLER again. Although what you had edited was still in memory, we're loading the original file over it in case any of the changes you made would have caused Pie Chart to miss some of the data. You'll have a chance to experiment with and graph your own data later on. Okay, now go back to the main menu and select Pie Chart. After a few seconds, you will see the Pie Chart parameter screen. Through the use of this input screen, you can tell the program exactly how you want the finished pie chart to look. There are six parameters to be set.Next to the first is a blinking pointer.This serves as the pointer to which question you can answer at this time. You have complete control over which of the questions you can give an answer to.To move the pointer, press either the right arrow or left arrow key. All of the parameters are set by numbers as indicated by the questions. You'll note that there is a default given to the right of each question, so you don't have to change any parameter that is already set correctly. To changea parameter, you move the pointer to theleft of that question and press the space bar. A prompt will appear at the bottom of the screen. Just enter the newnumber. The first question is how many label fields to read. This relates back to the discussion of labels in one or two columns in the Data Editor section. If the labels in the data screen were two columns wide, as they are in the sample file, this parameter should be set to 2. Press the space bar, the 2 key, and return. The next question is which column to graph. The Pie Chart program, as you remember, can only graph one column fromthe data screen at a time. Look at the display of the legends at the top of thescreen. If you enter legends at the top of the data screen, they will remind youwhat you want to enter as the second parameter. In this case, enter a 2 into this second parameter to graph the data associated with legend 2. The third question is whether and how you want the data sorted. If you choose to sort by value, the largest slice of the pie will be graphed first and the smallest last, with the corresponding labels being printed in the same order. If you sort by label, the labels will be in alphabetical orderand the slices of the pie will correspond to the order of the labels. If you choose not to sort at all, both the data and the labels will be displayed in the order in which they were entered. Try all three settings. You'll probably find that you like different ones in different situations. The fourth question is a simple one: color. If you have a black and white monitor, the chart displayed in color will be very difficult to read, ifnot impossible. If you have a color monitor, you can choose either color or black and white. Color, of course, looksbetter, but also takes longer. Black andwhite is good for trial runs and charts you intend to print on a black and whiteprinter. If you plot a color chart, onlythe first five slices will be in color, so it is best to sort the data by value,causing the largest slices to be in color. The fifth parameter, style, may be difficult to understand at first. Why would you want a chart printed on its side? The answer is that if you are going to print the chart out, a verticalformat, with the labels printed underneath the pie, may look better thana horizontal one, with the labels besidethe pie. It's up to you. Finally, we have rotation. This parameter determines where on the circlethe pie begins to plot. Set at zero degrees, the first slice's trailing edgeis straight down from the center of the pie. Under certain color combinations incolor charts, one color will bleed into another. This can usually be prevented by trying different settings of the rotation parameter. For now, leave it atzero. If at any time while setting parameters you want to return to the Menu, pressing control-Q will get you there. By this point you should be ready to process the pie chart. Press control-P and the chart will be plotted in a few moments. When it is done, hit akey to get a menu from which you can return to the main menu, look again at the chart, or change the parameters to try again. Remember that if you want to save a chart, you must return to the Menu and then go to the disk menu beforeyou create another chart. Return to the Menu now and we'll look into the procedure for creating a bar/line chart. DATA EDITOR REVISITED Before we run Bar/Line Chart, we need to get some data that was designed for this kind of graph. Go to the disk menu and load the data file BAR/LINE SAMPLER. Then return to the main menu and run the Data Editor again. Be sure to answer N to the clear data question. This time you'll see datawith labels in only one column. Bar/LineChart is unable to use labels in two columns. The eight character limit is a practical one. In the case of bar and line charts, the labels will be printed at the bottom of the chart, along the X axis. Longer labels would substantially limit the amount of space available for the chart itself. In most cases, the labels on the X axis denote the passage of time. You canenter them into the left hand column by hand, of course, but in certain common situations, the Data Editor has a facility for entering them automatically. Press control-X to enter this facility. Your options at this point are to create labels on the X axis for months, days of the week, or a range of numbers.The current X axis is a range of eighteen months with year labels added in by hand. Since the data is fictitiousanyway, let's make the labels for years instead. Select a range of numbers from the first menu. You will be asked how many numbers in the range. Because we have data in all eighteen rows, enter 18. Now the program asks what number to start with. Enter 1965. Finally, it willask you for the increment. Enter a 1. After a few seconds, the data screen will come back with the years 1965 through 1982 in the left column. The two final commands in the Data Editor allow you to add or delete a row of data. These two functions operate in pretty much the same way; add is activated by control-A and delete is activated by control-D. In either case, the function will work on the row the cursor is in. To illustrate how these functions work, let's use the delete command to update the data to include 1983. Move the cursor to the top row if it isn't there already. Press control-D and answer Y when it asks if you want to delete this line. These questions are asked as an extra security measure to avoid the destruction of valuable data. When the top line was deleted, the data beneath it moved up to fill in the space. If you had added a line instead, the data would naturally have moved down, incidentally losing the last line.Anyway, you now have a blank data line at the bottom in which you can enter data for 1983. The easiest way to get there is to move the cursor up with control-I. Since we were on the top line, control-I wraps you around to the bottom. Now enter 1983 in the first column,and whatever data you think is reasonable in the other columns. If you leave a column blank, Bar/Line Chart will treat it as if a zero had been there. Now you're ready for Bar/Line Chart. Quit the Data Editor with control-Q and select Bar/Line Chart fromthe main menu. BAR/LINE CHART Bar/Line Chart takes a few seconds to "warm up" before it offers you anything to do. This is because, unlike Pie Chart, it reads all the data before you set the parameters. Be patient, thiswait will save you some time later. The parameter selection screen in Bar/Line Chart is both more complex and less self-explanatory than the one in Pie Chart. This is because there is moredata that can be graphed in a single chart and as such more decisions to make. Only so much information can be presented in a single screen. The commands in this program, like those in the Data Editor, are listed butnot explained at the bottom of the screen. Let's take them one at a time. The four legends are printed at thetop of the screen, when there are four legends. While legends are optional in Pie Chart, they are required in Bar/LineChart. A column that does not have a legend cannot be graphed. Press L. A cursor will appear next to the assigned chart type of legend one, which defaults to line. To make that column chart as a bar, press B. To make it a line, press L or return to accept the default. If you don't want that column in the picture at all, pressN. Use this to set chart types for the rest of the legends. If there is no legend for a given column, Bar/Line Chart will automatically skip over that legend. Now take a look at the display of the years in the center of the screen. Over 1966 there is a < sign and over 1983 there is a > sign. These indicate the first and last row to be charted. The program defaults to the first and last possible field, unless there is a gap in the labels. That is, a row that has no label at all. In that case, the program will stop looking for data at that row and never see the data after it. To change the default setting, say to graph only the last five years, pressB. The beginning pointer will flash, andyou will now be able to move it to the desired location with the arrow keys. Hitting return accepts the current position. The E command works the same way on the end pointer. By pressing T, you can enter a title for the chart. This data cannot beentered with the Data Editor because youmight want to change it depending on thedata you choose to graph. Pressing return without entering anything acceptswhat is there. Otherwise whatever you enter completely overwrites any existingtitle. You may have noticed that as you changed which columns or rows were to begraphed, two fields at the bottom of thescreen, labeled least and most value, were updated. These numbers determine what kind of range you can give the Y axis. Press Y to set up that range. The first number you enter is the number that will appear at the bottom ofthe Y axis. It must not be greater than the least value readout to its left. Thenext number is the high setting for the Y axis, which must not be less than the reading to its left. The last number is the Y increment. It determines what the increment of the numbers on the Y axis will be as well as how closely spaced the grid lines will be. You can enter any positive value in here, so long as the program determines that there is enough room along the axis for all the necessary labels. The program will inform you if you enter a bad value hereor in any of the other Y parameters. Pressing C from the command mode simply changes the color setting. This setting affects only the appearance of bar charts. Lines are keyed by symbols rather than color in either case. Pressing G allows you to change thegrid density. A setting of zero means nogrid, while a setting of four causes theprogram to use solid lines for the grid.The settings in between are for various densities of dotted lines. Finally, pressing control-P processes the chart, as in the Pie Chartprogram. If you want to return to Menu without processing a chart, use control-Q. The options available after the chart is processed are the same as they were in the Pie Chart program. That completes this introduction tothe SoftGraph graphing system. What follows is a reference list to the commands in the various programs. Good luck with SoftGraph, and feel free to contact Softalk with any problems you may have with either the disk or the programs. Reference Card Menu Run any program in SoftGraph from the main menu. Select the disk menu to load or save data files or picture files, to catalog the disk, or to look at a picture in memory. Data Editor All command mode commands are activated by pressing the control key atthe same time as the key indicated. I J K - Move the cursor from cell to M cell. Also return and right arrow. L - Enter legends. X - Enter labels in X field automatically. C - Clear the data field. A - Add a line at the indicated row. D - Delete a line from the indicated row. Q - Quit and return to menu. Pie Chart Space - Enter new setting at parameter indicated by cursor. Return - Accept newly entered setting. Arrows - Move pointer to new parameter. Control-P - Process chart. Control-Q - Quit and return to Menu. Escape aborts. Bar/Line Chart L - Assign chart type to the four legends: B - Bar chart. L - Line chart. N - No chart of this data. B - Set beginning of X axis. Arrows move pointer one field. Return accepts indicated field. E - Set end of X axis. Same as B. T - Enter title for chart. Return accepts title listed if nothing has been changed. Y - Set low value, high value, and increment of Y axis. C - Toggle color on and off. G - Set grid density from 0 to 4. 0 - No grid. 4 - Solid lines for grid. control-P - Process the chart. control-Q - Quit and return to menu. Escape aborts.
