Plot styles in new beta

Questions about MultiCharts and user contributed studies.
janus
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Plot styles in new beta

Postby janus » 08 Jul 2009

I was wondering if there's anything new in the way one can plot an indicator. For example, can you now stop and start a plot while using the solid line style to leave gaps? Also, can one now use different weights for all the other line styles as well as the solid line? Thanks.

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TJ
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Postby TJ » 08 Jul 2009

one more for the wish list...

the ability to control plot type/style from the keyword.

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Postby Nick » 09 Jul 2009

And a 'region plot' .....shade between a hi and lo value. Stair case would be useful too rather than an indicator moving diagonally between plot n and n+1 have it horizontal and then 'step' to the new level.

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Postby janus » 10 Jul 2009

Also, I would love to plot vertically on a bar. This may be very hard so an alternative would be to plot with an intrabar time offset. That way one could plot a line almost vertically on say a 5 minute chart using an offset of 1 second on either side.

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Postby TJ » 10 Jul 2009

Also, I would love to plot vertically on a bar. This may be very hard so an alternative would be to plot with an intrabar time offset. That way one could plot a line almost vertically on say a 5 minute chart using an offset of 1 second on either side.

you mean similar to the "Left Tick" and "Right Tick" arrangement? but plot a Left/Right vertical bar instead of a little tab?

I would like that too.
Last edited by TJ on 10 Jul 2009, edited 1 time in total.

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Postby janus » 10 Jul 2009

No, you can already do that using "bar high" and "bar low". I mean be able to draw a continuous line twice on the same bar, or nearly so using a slight offset. One can do this with the trend line method but I hate using it to draw lines for indicators. It uses too much resources (I would end up drawing 100's of 1000's of them), and one can mistakenly move it by clicking on it. Attached is an example.
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Postby Nick » 13 Jul 2009

Actually what I meant was a horizontal stair step a bit like the attached. You can do it with lines but you end up with thousands.
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Postby janus » 13 Jul 2009

Yes, that would be a nice option too. Bit surprised it can't do it already.

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Marina Pashkova
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Postby Marina Pashkova » 23 Jul 2009

Hi everybody,

Thank you all for the suggestions. We are considering implementation of 'stepped' plots. As for the other types suggested above, this is something we will think about in future.

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Postby janus » 23 Jul 2009

Marina, all we need is the ability to plot an indicator the same way a pen plotter would. We can do all this using trend lines but as you know they consume too much compute resources (like memory and slows down scrolling) if we have many thousands of them. So, I can see only two options. One is to add another trend line like feature that has none of the advanced attributes - just start & end points, color, size and style, so it uses minimal resources. The other is to enhance the indicator plot to stop and start at any given point in time and price. I can see problems doing this with plotn as it may be hard to plot more than once on a given bar. But if you can find a way to do this then it would be fantastic. On idea is to use the same method as the HP pen plotters I used to program in HPGL 30 years ago. Have a commands like "pen up" and "pen down". That way we could have the following sequence of commands for plotting:

pen up
plot at specific date/time and price using plotn without leaving a line trace
pen down
plot at another specific date/time and price; this would draw a line. The date/time can be the same but would require an optional keyword to keep the previously plotted starting position.
etc.
etc.

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Postby Andrew Kirillov » 29 Jul 2009

If we just implement 'stepped' line will work ok?

The way Nick suggested.

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Postby janus » 29 Jul 2009

If we just implement 'stepped' line will work ok?

The way Nick suggested.
Not really as I still want to have gaps as well. For the best approach I would like to plot an indicator of any sort. Trend lines are too resource hungry and are not meant to be used as indicators anyway. I just want to plot a vertical line at any time and stop plotting at any time to leave gaps on the chart. Here's one approach:

Have an option with plotn when I need to plot a vertical line to keep the previous end point plotted and draw a vertical line to another level on the same bar. If that option happened to be used with a plot command with a different date and time, then it behaves no differently to now - just plot a line to the bar with that date and time.

Have another command that turns off the plotting for a particular indicator (like a "pen up" command on a pen plotter) so subsequent plot commands can be executed but no lines are drawn. Then another command is used to turn plotting back on ("pen down") and the next plot command will form the beginning of the next line segment leaving a gap from the previously drawn line.

With this approach one could plot steps, saw-tooth, and other various wave patterns for cycle work, as well as breaks in a line for support and resistance lines, necklines, etc..


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