Setting the Y-axis and Margins

There a few small hurdles left to overcome in our search for the Playfair original! First we can tidy up the main heading, which should read:

Interest of the NATIONAL DEBT from the Revolution

and be written in 12-point Times Italic. Actually it should be in Garamond, which you can try for yourself later, assuming you have the correct font on your computer! To save a little typing, copy the above heading to the clipboard, open up the property sheet to show the Heading and Heading font, and paste in the text:

I have also set the font and font-size. GraPL uses a set of simple short-codes for the font-names here, which helps to map them correctly to PostScript fonts (when you export a chart as an EPS document) or to generic fonts which work well on the Internet. You can use any available Windows font here, but you are strongly recommended to stay with Times and Arial if you want to keep your charts portable. As always, press the ‘...’ button or hit Ctrl+Enter if you need more help with the property. In this case you get a simple dialogue to help you choose the font, size and colour:

Now to set the X-caption and move the Y-axis across to the other side. First you can paste the line below into the X-caption setting, and you should also set the Axis style to ‘centred’ and the font to 9-point Times-Italic, black.

The Bottom Line is Years, those on the Right Hand Millions of Pounds

Note that there is a quick way of expanding and collapsing the property tree with the keyboard – just press shift+Enter in the edit-box opposite an expandable node and it will unroll or roll up for you. To move the y-axis over to the right, you might guess that you just type ‘right’ into the style property, or you could hit the ‘...’ button to find out what else is possible here:

If you really want to know what these buttons do, hit the Help button and read the page from the reference manual. The first column of options adds various visual effects (like an arrowhead at the end of the axis), the second column sets the axis position, the third column controls how tick-marks are drawn (negative, positive, across, none and plain) and the final column sets the alignment of the caption relative to the axis.

For now, just chose ‘Right’ here to get a result like:

It is an interesting historical note that Playfair intentionally toned-down the political impact of his chart by forcing a large y-axis range. You can see that I have over-ridden the range, and also the y-tickmarks as the (auto) setting chooses to make ticks at 0,2,4 ... up to 20. We have one problem left to solve – in moving the axis across we have unbalanced the margins and ruined the overall proportion of the graphic. To fix this, go back up to the chart frame and select the Margins property.

The margins look much better now, and we really are closing in. The final challenge is to add those historical notes, and to label the main body of the chart “INTEREST OF NATIONAL DEBT.” to emphasise its political message.

Continue to: Noting the Historical Events