Introduction.txt

wxFreeChart version 1.6.

Copyright (c) 2008-20010 Moskvichev Andrey V.

				Contents.
I.   About.
II.  Requirments.
III. Chart types.
IV.  Basic concepts.

				I. About.
	wxFreeChart is the free crossplatform chart library based on wxWidgets.
	wxFreeChart licensed under wxWindows library license.

				II. Requirments.
	wxFreeChart requires wxWindows library version 2.8.0 or later
(work with wxWidgets 2.6.x not tested).

				III. Chart types.
	wxFreeChart supports following types of charts:
1. Line or histogram charts based on xy coordinates.
2. Bar charts.
3. Layered bar charts.
4. Stacked bar charts.
5. OHLC (Open-High-Low-Close) financial charts.
6. Pie charts. TODO
7. Date/Time based line or histogram charts.
8. Bubble charts, based on xyz coordinates.
9. Statistical charts with std-deviations, etc. TODO
10. Gantt charts. 

				IV. Basic concepts.
	wxFreeChart is powerful object-oriented charting library with 
model-controller-view design.

	First class that you need is Chart. It contains plot, chart title, and various
attributes. Chart delegates drawing operations to Plot, Plot delegates to
dataset renderers, axes and other graphical objects (like legend, 
markers, area draws, etc). 
	Plot class glues axes (if any), datasets, legend, data markers, etc.

	Dataset classes contains data to be drawn. There are XY datasets,
OHLC datasets, date/time datasets (for data linked with date/time values),
category datasets, Gantt datasets, etc.
 
	Data drawing performed by dataset renderers, like XYRenderers,
OHLC renderers (Bars or candlesticks), histogram renderers, etc.

	Axis classes performs axes drawing on plot and data scaling. They also
support windows. Window is visible part of data. They can be used, when 
data is too long to be drawn at once.
	wxChartPanel is wxWidgets window containing chart.
	
	Other classes include Legend, Marker, AreaDraw,	ColorScheme, Symbol.
	Legend performs legend drawing, contains attributes like, legend position,
font, etc.
 
	Marker is base class for data markers, like point markers,
line markers, range markers. It is still work in progress. 

	AreaDraw is helper class for drawing rectangular areas. 
It is used to draw chart, plot backgrounds, bars in bar charts.
 
	ColorScheme is colours collection for pie plots, etc.
	
	Symbol is base class for symbols drawn on legends and xy points.

FIXME: write more.