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Sunday, August 24, 2014

Thickness of lines and the drawing sequence

Sometimes I get two lines that run together. For example I want to see that UNRATE produces exactly the same graph as UNEMPLOYED divided by the civilian labor force age 16 and over, CLF16OV. I was doing that. But I lost my focus when I got the graph that should have shown what I wanted to see. Should have shown, but didn't.

When two lines completely overlap, you can only see one of them. Of course. So what I like to do is make one of the lines thinner and the other thicker. With the old FRED it worked every time: I made the first line 3 or 4 pixels wide, and the second line 1 or 2 pixels wide, and right away I would get a two-color line that showed either similarity or difference, and either way it answered my question and set my mind at ease.

But that was the old FRED. The new FRED saves a step when it refreshes the graph. Evidently, if you change the thickness of one line, it only redraws that one line... or anyway, it redraws the changed line last.

With the old FRED, it would draw Data Series 1 first, and Data Series 2 second, and I could depend on it. And I did depend on it. With the new FRED, I'm not really sure what the hell it does, and I have to fuck with it to get the graph I want.

And then, after I get it looking the way I want, if I create a link to the graph and use the link to see the graph, it often comes up different from what I want, again -- perhaps because it's now creating the graph from scratch.

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