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Changelog

Source: NEWS.md

loon 1.4.3

  • now works in Tcl 8.6 and Tcl 9.0.1

  • changes are many to the base loon tcl code. Mostly

    • to be more careful about namespaces, Tcl 9 is stricter

    • to be more careful with math function changes in Tcl 9

    • bugs in image_scale.tcl fixed; imageviewer code cleaned up

  • in R code, changes to

    • onLoad.R file to remove checking based on .withTclImg All dependent packages should remove any reference to loon:::.withTclImg

    • l_image_import_files() now checks if tcl library tk image extension (Img) is available at run time to parse legitimate image file types

    • l_export() tries to be clearer in documentation about the limitations; l_export_valid_formats() tries to not rely on .withTclImg

loon 1.4.2

CRAN release: 2025-05-29

Addresses minor documentation issues:

  • Added system requirement of Tcl/Tk = 8.6
    (current version packaged in R is 8.6.x)

  • Added some documentation for a few (internal) functions that are now exported.

loon 1.4.1

CRAN release: 2023-06-15

Addresses a minor issue:

  • Issue: Despite setting the connectedScales parameter as “none”, every loon plot continued to share identical scales.

  • Cause: This was due to the connectedScales parameter not being passed into the function, leading to a failure in the logical check.

loon 1.4.0

CRAN release: 2022-03-12

Minor changes and additions

  • Added "loon.shiny" to l_web() now that it appears as part of diveR package

  • Added arguments to l_hist() for character vectors and factors.

    • Now factors ALWAYS created and placed in a layer.
    • Factor layer is simply hidden if showFactors = FALSE
    • More flexibility given to user in terms of factor text size, angle of rotation, and colour
    • Changed default y positions to 0 so that labels do not disappear with switch to yshows = "density".

loon 1.3.9

CRAN release: 2022-02-07

Some minor changes in facets:

  • in facet_wrap, as the number of facet variables increase, the layout pattern is not consistent (e.g., one variable: the layout is by row; more than one variables: the layout is by column).

  • fix typos: “extent” –> “extend”

loon 1.3.8

CRAN release: 2021-09-27

  • Removed the vignette “Example analysis” on the minority data to make room for a new vignette “Publishing loon plots”

  • New helper functions for changing grobs produced by loonGrob()

    • l_instantiateGrob, l_setGrobPlotView, and l_updateGrob

  • Export some useful helper functions:

    • glyph_to_pch: turn a loon point glyph to an R graphics plotting “character”.

    • get_display_color: return the displayed color.

    • as_hex6color: return a 6 hexidecimal digit color representations.

    • get_font_info_from_tk: return font information.

    • get_layer_states: get layer states

    • get_model_display_order: get the order of the displayed elements, e.g., points in scatterplot and lines in serialaxes.

    • tcl_img_2_r_raster: turn a tk image object to an R raster object.

    • char2num.data.frame: a character data frame to a numerical data frame.

loon 1.3.7

CRAN release: 2021-06-14

  • A new function l_colorName is exported which returns the build-in color names based on the 12 or 6 hex code.

  • For loonGrob, remove the lines at the base of the tick marks

loon 1.3.6

CRAN release: 2021-05-10

  • fixed printing bug just introduced by change to facets.

loon 1.3.5

CRAN release: 2021-05-06

  • l_web() now expanded to provide access to other loon related package documentation from the great-northern-diver github organization’s set of repositories (in anticipation of putting diveR on CRAN)

  • Improved look of compound displays. (A lot of this is a result of changes to loon.ggplot package).

    Includes

    • new arguments plotWidth and plotHeight to l_facet() and l_pairs()
    • look of labels (identifying facetted rows and columns)
    • facetted displays now more loon consistent default argument look up; i.e. now standardized via l_getOption() (e.g. bg = l_getOption("canvas_bg_guides"))
    • more meaningful names given to grobs for facets. (as in loonGrob())

  • initial tk window sizes are now larger (500 x 500 instead of 200 x 200)

loon 1.3.4

CRAN release: 2021-03-16

  • A new vignette

    • “Logical queries in interactive graphics”

      Explains how to use loon’s interactive plots and inspector to construct logical queries on the displayed data.

      An enriched version of mtcars is used for illustration.

      How a plot’s linkingKey (from Loon’s linking model) can be used to access the correct elements of any logical operation is also described.

  • minor bug fixes and improvements

    • Three minor bug fixes on facets

      • If the by is a formula with loon n-dimensional states, no need to provide additional data, the formula should be able to be converted to a data frame given by the states info.

      • When by has missing values, it is treated as other n-dimensional states:

        drop NAs, leave warnings (which one are removed)

      • Removed unnecessary warnings.

    • l_pairs() has a progress bar for constructing, linking, and connecting the scales of the plots.

      there is now a new argument showProgressBar that allows this to be suppressed (e.g. in RMarkdown files)

    • for histograms of factors and character vectors: default setting of arg showFactors

      • previously: TRUE whenever number of factor levels (or equivalent unique strings) < 10
      • now: TRUE whenever < 25 to accomodate common factors like month or the 24 hours in a day.

    • updated documentation on l_layer()

  • testing

    • As all examples are wrapped in if(interactive), check all interactive examples to ensure they work well

    • hexadecimal colours seem to get slightly (generally ignorable) different hexadecimal values for colours in tcltk on Solaris (see 1.3.3 comments). this caused problems in testing for exact colours on Solaris.

      Until this is sorted out, the testing for colour hex values in the test suite were commented out to prevent loon from being unnecessarily archived on CRAN. (The colours are correct, but our previous solution generated warnings, which may cause problems for CRAN acceptance.) Likely, in the future, we suppress the warning from l_hexcolor() when testing.

    • for iris dataset in tests, we drop an observation so that for each species, the number of observations are different.

loon 1.3.3

CRAN release: 2021-02-25

  • an extremely minor update

    • test functions were changed to accommodate possibly inconsistent hex colours on Solaris OS.

      For example, in Solaris only, the hex12 for the color “red” appears both as “#FFFF00000000” and “#FF0000000000”. This can lead to failures of testing equality on the hex12 strings (though both appeared by creating the hex12 version of R’s “red” in TCL, as in l_hexcolor("red"))

      Both hex 12 representations convert to hex 6 as “#FF0000”. That is, hex12tohex6("#FFFF00000000") and hex12tohex6("#FF0000000000") return "#FF0000" except that the second also generates a warning.

    • also took the opportunity to

      • give more meaningful names to grobs when loonGrob() is called on an l_compound

      • update the documentation summary l_plot_arguments to include arguments by, on, layout, and connectedScales all of which are related to facetting plots at creation.

      • wrap the examples in Bin_cut with if (interactive()) {}

loon 1.3.2

CRAN release: 2021-02-23

  • Updated linking to once again be more natural

    Problem: If a plot p1 say already exists and participates in some linking group, say “mylinkingGroup”, then creating a new plot in the same linking group via the command line console (that is not using the inspector) then some decisions on syncing the new plot’s linked states need to be made.

    To this end, the new plot can make decisions via the argument sync as in

    p2 <- l_plot(x, linkingGroup = "myLinkingGroup", sync = "pull", ...)

    or

    p2 <- l_plot(x, linkingGroup = "myLinkingGroup", sync = "push", ...)

    If a value for sync is not given, it will default to sync = "pull", the idea being that the user intends to pull all linkable state values because they indicated having p2 join the group at the time of its creation.

    What has to be considered is what happens if, in the remaining ... arguments, the user simultaneously includes values for some of the linkable states such as color = "red".

    The solution below tries to infer some of the intention of the user, when it can, and warn when it cannot.

    Solution: Suppose that p1 exists as a plot in linkingGroup = "myLinkingGroup" and the user is now creating a new plot, say p2, with argument linkingGroup = "myLinkingGroup" given in the call to create p2.

    If

    1. the argument sync = "push" is given in the call, then

      1. if any linkable states are explicitly given as part of the call:

        • those explicitly given will have their values pushed to all members of the group;
        • those not explicitly given explicitly will not be pushed.

      2. if no linkable states are explicitly given as part of the call:

        • all linkable states will have their default values pushed to the group and a warning given.

    2. the argument is sync = "pull" (either by default or explicitly given to be "pull") and the values are explicitly specified for some linkable states, then

      • these are ignored, and
      • if they are different from the values of those states shared by the group, a warning is given.

  • For a loon histogram, if the input is a list, the histogram will be split into multiple panels. The x of each facet corresponds to an element in that list

  • A new feature has been added to l_serialaxes(..., andrews = TRUE) that will produce Andrews’s Fourier functional curves for the data.

  • A new statistical layer l_layer_smooth will generate a smooth for the active points and add it as a layer

  • Minor bugs were fixed/improvements made such as

    • allowing a single point plot to be drawn with polygon glyph
    • having the pairs pan and zoom work when histograms are shown on the diagonal
    • progress bars added for pairs (and other l_compounds) when there are a lot of plots to be constructed.
    • compound plots (e.g. pairs plots) now accept any parent so that they can be later packed as part of some more complex user defined plot

loon 1.3.1

CRAN release: 2020-06-17

  • Added new functions l_loonWidgets() which returns widgets of all displayed loon plots. Related functions include

    • l_basePaths() and l_compoundPaths
    • l_getFromPath()

  • Fixed bug so that l_make_glyphs() again works in Mac OS Catalina (Thanks to Brian Ripley and Simon Urbanek)

    • Cool new example there which produces the Periodic Table of the Elements as a scatterplot (data “elements” from loon.data package).
      Actually see the periodicity by brushing.

  • A minor bug fix with respect to facet label layout

  • “color”, “size”, “linewidth”, “glyph”, added to ‘l_userOptions()’

    • default “color”, “size”, “linewidth”, “glyph”, etc. now set to look up default ‘l_getOption(“linewidth”)’ etc.
    • this allows the user to change the default look of all plots simply by using ‘l_setOption(“color”, “black”)’ for example.

loon 1.3.0

CRAN release: 2020-05-24

  • several new features added to loon plots
    • NAs are now accommodated
    • histograms recognize factors to produce barplots
  • group by and facetting in loon plots
    • l_plot() and l_hist() now accept arguments by and facet
  • improved docuentation
    • new vignettes
    • better organized reference manual via l_web()
  • in some OSes the function l_image_import_files() has stopped working
    • seems to be a problem with the tcltk function tkimage.create()
    • tkimage.create() function works on older .png files but seemingly not on newer ones
    • l_make_glyphs() calls l_image_import_files() and so although it will still create the necessary png files, it may fail to read them back in.
    • the problem has been observed (unreliably) to work if the png is further processed outside R.
    • so demo(“l_make_glyphs”) has been removed

loon 1.2.3.9000

  • deprecated l_saveStatesRDS()
    • replaced by l_saveStates
    • reasoning for name change is to have the same name be used in the Python release for the same functionality
    • introduced l_getSavedStates() to read the states (instead of readRDS for the same reason as above).
  • updated l_cget()
    • Fixed reading of labels to retrieve raw characters so that braces etc. can appear in labels
    • updated l_hist.factor so that a layer of factor level labels appear below the corresponding bar

loon 1.2.3

CRAN release: 2019-10-16

  • added l_saveStatesRDS()
    • saves named or all states to disk for later retrieval (e.g. in Rmarkdown)
  • added l_copyStates(source, target)
    • copies the info_state values of source to that of target.
    • some basic states are excluded but can be overridden.

loon 1.2.2

CRAN release: 2019-03-23

  • added l_plot3D contributed by Martin Gauch (for rwo)
  • l_pairs linking issues and arguments for histograms and serialaxes in the display are fixed
  • added a new vignette “loon and RMarkdown” and tidied up some others
  • new functionality to make it easy to construct statistical glyphs from any R plotting function
    • new demo(l_make_glyphs) to illustrate statistical glyphs
    • tiny new data set oliveLocations for lat and long of olive data growing areas (used in demo)
    • tidied up a couple of demos (very superficially)

loon 1.2.1

CRAN release: 2018-12-10

  • updated loonGrob() and grid.loon()
    • provide more meaningful grobs (including better descriptions and more informative “empty” grobs).
    • added condGrob() to effect the conditional construction of either the desired grob (if it is visible in the loon plot) or the empty grob as placeholder containing relevant arguments
  • introduced the method plot.loon() so that plot(p) of a loon plot p will now draw the corresponding grid object on the current device

loon 1.2.0

CRAN release: 2018-09-30

  • added loonGrob() and grid.loon() functionality

    • any loon plot can now be converted and saved as a grid graphics object
    • permits printing/exporting snapshots of loon plots in documentation
    • S3 class structure extended to more loon plots

  • l_compound classes introduced to ease user creation of complex layouts

    • includes simple programming interface to extend loonGrob() to any user-defined
    • converted current compound layouts to new l_compound model (e.g. l_pairs, l_stl)
    • l_getPlots which returns a list of the loon plots in the display (works for simple loon plots too)
    • l_getLocations which returns a matrix showing the location of the loon plots (in order) (works for simple loon plots too)
    • l_get_arrangeGrobArgs which returns the arguments and their values to be passed on to arrangeGrob() (from gridExtra) to allow arbitrary layout by the user.
      • this is NOT implemented for simple loon plots (but could perhaps be)
    • loonGrob_layoutType which returns a string indicating whether "location" or "arrangeGrobArgs” are to be used when creating a grid version of the l_compound. (default is "locations", other possibility is "arrangeGrobArgs"

  • Fixed widget handle class order: specific classes first.

  • l_hexcolor.R

  • l_plot_decomposed_ts

  • l_cget and l_configure are now a generics with methods for objects of class loon, character, and l_compound.

  • New functions l_getOption, l_getOptionNames, l_userOptions, l_userOptionDefault, l_setOption

  • New function l_primitiveGlyphs

  • names for loon object handles to print out the state names. l_state_names can be used alternatively

loon 1.1.0

CRAN release: 2017-07-26

  • first release on CRAN
  • change state names
    • itemlabel to itemLabel
    • showItemlabels to showItemLabels
  • automatically convert nested lists and data.frames
    • unexported l_nestedTclList2Rlist and l_data
  • remove the local copy of the website and make l_help point to the official website.

loon 1.0.1

  • Bug fix in geodesic2d for 4d transitions

loon 0.9.1

  • Bug fix when layering maps (sp classes) with asSingleLayer=TRUE
  • Bug fix in scale_image

loon 0.9

  • initial beta release for the general public