Steema Central

Folks,

I've been working on this one for days now. I give up and turn to you for help here...

The issue is SmoothStretch and transparent pie charts.

SmoothStretch is WONDERFUL (omg!!!), and for the first time (I've been using TeeChart since version 1 that shipped with Delphi 1), I'm able to produce exquisitely sexy pie charts that are both 3-D AND smoothly rounded. I've worked with Marjan over the years regarding this topic of how to produce 3-D pie charts that don't have "the jaggies" on export to file or stream, and had all but given up until you introduced SmoothStretch.

HOWEVER.... if the Chart color is set to clNone to produce transparent charts, it's another story. Anything (e.g., text such as label text or Chart Title) outside of the chart itself looks really choppy, almost as though it were nervous. I'll be happy to provide actual output of the charts, bitmaps demonstrating this.

If I have a theme, or even simply set Chart Gradient Visible, everything is fine, clean looking. This problem only arises when I have Chart1.Color set to clNone, with no chart background of any kind.

It's as though SmoothStretch has nothing to hook onto as it performs its AntiAlias algorithm using the Lanczos stuff. I also tried using Image32, in case it was something inherently in your SmoothStretch procedure. I tried THEIR implementation of Lanczos, as well as trying their BoxKernel, LinearKernel, SplineKernel, and MitchellKernel. They all produced output with the same general issue - unless it had an actual background to apply the AntiAlias to, the results weren't right.

HELP!!! Having the ability to produce transparent smoothly rounded pie charts is critical to the next (announced) release of my application.

Hopefully this rambling made sense. If not, please let me know, I'll be glad to clarify anything you need me to, or supply samples of what I'm talking about..

Thanks in advance,
richard diamond

Hi Richard,

Would you be so kind to send us a simple example project we can run "as-is" to reproduce the problem here?

You can either post your files at news://www.steema.net/steema.public.attachments newsgroup or at our upload page.

Thanks in advance.

I'll be happy to! I'm working on that now.

I'm hoping that by preparing this sample app to send along to you, it will work correctly for me, and so I'll be able to better isolate where I'm going wrong on MY end of things, in the larger application!

Since a screen shot is worth a thousand words, in the meantime I've sent DiamondSampleAntialiasCharts.zip to your upload page demonstrating The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly...

Regards,
richard diamond