Digital Analytics
Digital Analytics
The original purpose of the EDTECH program for Windows was to easily produce excellent printed black-and-white scientific-style plots and other line graphics, as printed pages and as black-and-white graphics files (.emf, .pcx, or .jpg) up to 2400 by 3000 pixels in size, which you can print with high resolution or embed in word processor documents (.emf and .jpg work with MS Word, but not .pcx). The graphics also appear for editing on the screen, but the initial screen display of your drawing is a preliminary view with about 1/3 the resolution of the printed image.
Later in its long development period special features were added to enable it to work in conjunction with my other software. This has become the primary use of the program.
The old DOS version of EDTECH provided graphics support for the advanced projects of Payne Dynafoils, Inc. for over 6 years in the 1990's. Thus EDTECH is actually a rather old program and does not conform to certain modern Windows conventions, but we find it extremely useful. EDTECH graphic images are painted bit maps rather than graphic objects like in Microsoft Excel. Therefore, you cannot drag and stretch them with the mouse. If you want to change them you must erase and redraw them (there is an Un-draw mode for erasing and several other ways to erase and modify drawings).
Since EDTECH has not proved very popular it can be freely downloaded. The demo is not lacking any features.
12,000 row X 500 column numerical worksheet for data preparation is provided. Formulas can be entered to compute a column from other columns, add constants to a column, etc.
Multiple linear regression and cubic spline curve-fitting are provided.
Data is input from simple text tables or EDTECH's own named data series database methodology which was especially designed for DMSolver output. Data can also be passed to/from Excel via simple worksheet (WKS) files, but these are virtually extinct, and when working with Excel you must create a .txt file with columns of numbers.
There are numerous options controlling graph types/styles --- linear, semi-log, and log-log two dimensional X-Y plots with various selectable degrees of automation/user-control in layout/scaling.
10 inch by 8 inch (optionally 8 inch by 10 inch "landscape") drawing page. Graphs and other drawn items (arrows, text, boxes, etc.) can be sized and positioned on the page. Text is in a variety of fonts. Drawing is 300 ppi.
Rectangular blocks from page or the whole page can be saved in .PCX (Paintbrush) files or .emf (enhanced meta-file), or .jpg for inclusion in word processor documents or printing. The .PCX format which we use is an extinct one, but the .emf and .jpg are still supported by MS Word and other applications
"Batch" macro-language automates frequently repeated plots, and allows plots from instructions and data produced by another program (e.g. other Digital Analytics applications).
Various features assist you in rapidly obtaining a good presentation of your data. The old-style EDTECH text fonts include the Greek alphabet and various symbols. If you select normal Windows-based text fonts you can include the Windows Symbols font.
For screening large amounts of data quickly the default graph style has relatively small point sizes, axis tick spacings, etc., and is located at the top of the page where it is immediately visible on your screen. Its scaling is entirely automatic. After initial examination of your data you can adjust axis sizes, sizing and positioning on the page, scaling details, fonts, etc. and replot.
A sample page of simple graphs shows a simple plot of 5 points with their regression fit in the default position and style at the top of the page. Then the plot was repeated at various positions and sizes to show how these can vary. The scaling remained automatic but minor adjustments to a tick spacing parameter were made. This page shows the largest and smallest point sizes. It was converted to PDF format since this is the best way to show EDTECH graphics in a way immediately accessible to most peoples' web browsers.
A page of multiple graphs from an actual technical report can also be printed to see the high density of details possible. This page was created from a large amount of computer-generated data. This page was actually created about 1996 with the DOS version of EDTECH, and the font styles are the old EDTECH ones which are not as good looking as the usual Windows styles that we frequently select since version 3.2 in 1999. Again it has been converted to PDF.
A DMSolver solution to a kinetics problem is an example of graphs for which many user-typed annotations were applied to the drawing.
While the normal way of operating EDTECH is through menus, mouse, and keystrokes, you can write a set of "batch" commands (in a file of type .ebt) to perform many functions.
The user's Fortran, Basic, Pascal, C, etc. analysis programs can output data to be read and automatically plotted by EDTECH through the "batch" feature. Full (not demo) Flash Calculator has auxilliary programs for estimating parameters. Their associated .ebt file drew a result plot (Bar sample 1), adding a label derived from the name in the database (Acetone_EtOH) of the set of data series used in the analysis and also drew the numeric parameter results of the analysis. When you are developing automatic plots you typically do them interactively first, setting various styling parameters, and then write the code in your Fortran, Pascal, etc., program to make use of the styles that have been established. With the full Flash Calculator much of EDTECH has been built into it to automatically create the graphs with links on the Flash Calculator page.Also, see boat lines (by the B3DBOAT program) in our technical paper about the BOAT3D program. BOAT3D has many .ebt files for specific purposes.
The "bar-connect" feature of EDTECH graph plotting was originally intended for drawing "error bars" (Bar sample 1) but it can also be used for unusual applications such as drawing histograms or plots such as Bar Sample 2, in which vertical and horizontal bars are both present. A "batch" list of commands to create histograms is included with EDTECH.