SVGGraph 3.20
Published
This version of SVGGraph ticks off something that has been on the to-do list since late 2019, so I'm glad to get it done. Especially because I had to learn or relearn some maths stuff to get it working.
Curved best-fit lines
I wasn't actually sure if this was a good idea or not - after all, I've already added support for curved line graphs. There is an important difference though: curved line graphs draw a curve that passes through all the points, whereas a curved best-fit line is a plot of the mathematical function that best matches the points.
Here's an example using the data from a previous graph that shows earthquake magnitudes with a curved best-fit line added in:
I don't believe the magnitude of earthquakes worldwide follows a mathematical curve, but this graph shows the best match for the data using a quintic function.
Okay, but what's "quintic"?
A quintic just means a mathematical function with fifth power in it like this:
y = ax5 + bx4 + cx3 + dx2 + ex + f
This is the default curve function that SVGGraph will use. There is a new option,
best_fit_type that can be set to another function to use instead, e.g.
“quadratic”, “cubic” or “quartic”. I am planning
to add support for more types of curve, but these seemed like a reasonable start.
Anything else?
The only other change in this version is adding support for using CSS units
in font sizes and line spacings. By CSS units, I only mean fixed units, not things
like em or ex. To be more specific, the supported units
are px, in, cm, mm, pt
and pc.
Download here
The new version of SVGGraph is available from the downloads page, or from GitHub / Packagist with Composer.