A Generalized Approach to Tags for ANTz

Alan Scrivener
SynGlyphX
11-Jun-2014

In wrestling with the issue of how to do tags in the glyph_factory, I asked myself, "What does the program know while it's processing a given row?" I figured what it doesn't know it can't use.

a sketch of what glyph_factory knows at a given row

In general, it knows what it read in from the files:

1. the input data file (name varies)
2. tags_template.txt
3. data_stats.txt
4. glyph_diff.txt
5. mapper.txt
6. links.txt

The first three are the important ones. From them we can identify and name the fields available to go into a tag (where 1 in the examples can be any digit):

__H1__ - row name header 1
__R1__ - row name 1
__C1__ - column 1 name
__D1__ - column 1 data value

I've made some simplifying assumptions here:

• We are going to process each glyh the same overall way, though with different data. (No conditional logic, i.e. doing one thing for one data row and another completely different thing for another row).
• The input data file has all of the text columns grouped on the right, so the program only has to know how many are numbers and how many are text.
• The user provides one row of the tags template file for each row in the first glyph file.
• The special strings such as __C1__, etc. do not appear anywhere in the input data file.

Given the above constraints, you can use the tags_template.txt file to tell glyph_factory how to format the tag for each sub-glyph (geometry) created. Each row results in a glyph made of sub-glyphs with the provided tags, with real data "plugged in" for the placeholders such as __C1__, etc.

Example

tags_template.txt
this is glyph row 1 - Header 1 is: __H1__
this is glyph row 2 - Header 2 is: __H2__
this is glyph row 3 - Hi mom!
this is glyph row 4 - Colname1 is __C1__
this is glyph row 5 - Colname2 is __C2__
this is glyph row 5 - Header 1 is: __H1__ and is still __H1__
this is glyph row 6 - Rowname 1 is: __R1__
this is glyph row 7 - Rowname 2 is: __R2__
this is glyph row 8 - Data3 is: __D3__

as well as this data file:

cities_data.csv Lat,Lon,Pop,Size,Year,Millionaires,R_groups,Name,Nickname 40.7127,-74.0059,8405837,468.5,1898,389000,2,New_York_City,Big_Apple 48.8567,2.3508,10413386,1098.4,-250,219000,2,Paris,City_of_Light 51.507222,-0.1275,8308369,606.95,43,281000,1,London,London_Town 48.133333,11.566667,1388308,119.86,1158,130000,1,Munich,Munchen -90,-180,1388308,119.86,1158,130000,1,SW,SouthWest 90,180,1388308,119.86,1158,130000,1,NE,NorthEast

glyph_factory makes the tags in this picture:

Last update: Wed, Jun 11, 2014 3:18:50 PM