NT7 Grid Interval Text Spacing

[shawnj]

This is a little nit-picky but I like the way NT6.5 arranged the y axis text on each grid line when we set a horizontal grid interval value other than 0.

In the attachment "NT6.5 Grid Interval Text Spacing" I have it set to 2 which produces grid lines every 2 ticks and the text is also aligned with each grid line.

However when I try to reproduce this with NT7 build 21, the text, in this case, is just rounding to every 0.5 points instead of aligning with the grid and displaying text every 2 ticks. See attachment "NT7 Grid Interval Text Spacing". Here in Chart Panel Properties I set Horizontal grid lines interval type = tick, and Horizontal grid lines interval value = 2.

thanks,
shawnj

[NinjaTrader_Austin]

shawnj, thank you for reporting, we will look into this.

[NinjaTrader_Bertrand]

I was unfortunately not able to reproduce here on B21, is this the TF 12-10 you're charting? What other chart and scale settings are you using as this happens?

Thanks

[shawnj]

The new attachment was created today just after the US equity futures close (Sept 13, 2010 3:15PM US Central time).

It was created as follows on nt7 beta 21 64bit:

1) File/New/Chart TF 12-10 Range Value=8.
2) Chart Panel Properties:
Horiz grid lines interval type = ticks.
Horiz grid lines interval value = 2.

Then adjust chart height to use full screen height (my screen is 1920 X 1200).
Then adjust chart width to about the size show. Roughly the left most bar is after 1PM Central.

shawnj

[NinjaTrader_JoshP]

Thanks for the suggestion. On certain ranges it can appear that way, even back in 6.5. What happens is there is logic in place that determines if having all of those prices shown on every horizontal grid line would be too cluttered. When it decides it would be, then instead of showing it on every single gridline it will show on an interval it calculates that would be even. As you zoom in/out of the range you can see this in effect. Reason this logic is required is because if you set the gridlines to something really small and having price text on every single grid would result in prices becoming completely unreadable.

[shawnj]

I seem to keep beating my head against a wall here . For whatever its worth, I've written and architectured lots of native (C++) charting code and I fully understand that the y axis text can overlap if the grid density gets too large.

The attachment "NT7 Grid Interval Text Spacing 2.prn" cannot be duplicated in NT6.5. Its obvious (to me) that the charting has been re-architectured and part of that included breaking out (refactoring) the y axis code into a new class. This was done so that each chart body class can now have a right and/or a left and/or an overlap y axis. A good basic software design.

One of the basic problems with this design, and I think this is the root of the problem that I'm trying to documenting here, is that to duplicate the NT6.5 gridline/text behavior, which works as would be expected from a good charting program, now the grid interval has to be communicated to two different classes, the chart body class which is responsible for drawing the gridlines, and the yAxis class which is responsible for drawing the text and the little pip mark. I'm guessing, NT7 does not currently do this.

If you look closely at "NT7 Grid Interval Text Spacing 2.prn" you can see two things:
1) The grid line density is not great enough to start skipping text.
2) The price text 649.5 is not aligned to a grid line. A descent y axis text placement algorithm, if it has decide the text is too dense (which it is not here) should skip to one of the next grid lines and align the text to that gridline.

I realize the NT7 code is still probably a little to rough (immature) to be dealing with the type of little details that I'm documenting here. I would hope that sometime in the next few builds, the charting software designer/developer could look at this.

The reason I'm even expending any energy on this, is as a trader, I like to set the grid density to 2 ticks and I like to be able to look directly at the price text that grid line represents. As NT7 currently is, we cant do that as is shown in the attachments.

shawnj

[NinjaTrader_Bertrand]

shawnj, thanks for the detailed feedback and input I'll forward it for consideration.