From Where I Sit: Story Sticks Tell the Story

By Larry Eiss

As my interest in woodworking became more serious I discovered a television show called The New Yankee Workshop. The show is hosted by Norm Abram, who is more commonly seen on "This Old House Classics" on HGTV. Watching Norm make furniture and other projects week after week was inspiring. I began to build simple projects using many techniques I had learned watching Norm. When I measured a board to make a cut, I used a tape measure, just like Norm.

As the complexity of my projects increased I began to discover that I was making errors in measurement. Being off just a little didn't matter in simple projects, but in more complex projects, each inaccuracy added to the previous ones and resulted in serious problems. As I searched for a way to resolve this problem, I learned of an altogether different measurement technique.

Master woodworkers often use a “story stick” to measure the various components of their projects. Stonemasons have used story sticks for centuries and it seems likely that the idea has its roots in ancient Egypt.

A story stick is a simple wooden stick with marks scribed across its width to represent an object's various sizes and characteristics. Since an object has height, width, and depth, the measurements for each dimension can be represented using three of the four surfaces of the stick.

Story sticks have distinct advantages over tape measures when creating furniture. The ability to read a tape measure is not required. There is substantially less opportunity for misreading a measurement. The measurements are more exact since they came from a copy of the actual object or a plan and were carefully verified. Story sticks are a very efficient way to ensure a quality result.

The next release of WebFOCUS is expected later this year. In this release we will introduce some new functionality in our graph engine that has similar benefits. Using WebFOCUS Release 5.3, you will be able to create graphs in a new output format called Scalable Vector Graphics. Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) is fundamentally different from image formats such as GIF, JPEG, or PNG.

Images can be drawn in two ways, through the use of pixels or vectors. Pixel-based images are drawn using dots. Curves are possible because the dots are small, but any angular representation other than perfectly vertical or horizontal lines makes the slight inaccuracy of dots apparent as jagged edges.

Vector-based images do not have this problem. They are drawn using mathematically derived lines and arcs, which connect two points and are not comprised of dots. This results in perfectly smooth curves and angular image elements.

You can see this effect in the pie chart images shown below. In the pixel-based image you can see the roughness of the angles and curves, but in the vector-based image these are clean and crisp.

In addition to SVG, graphs in Release 5.3 can be produced in Portable Network Graphics (PNG) format. This is a pixel-based format, but supports much greater color depth than GIF. Where GIF can use a maximum of 256 colors (8-bit color depth), PNG uses a palette of 64 million colors (24-bit color depth). The availability of this many colors eliminates the need for "dithering" where a desired color not in the 256-color palette is actually made of interspersed dots of two or more similar colors that are in the palette.

In the end, like using a story stick to build furniture, the ability to render WebFOCUS graphs as vector-based SVG images yields high-quality results. From where I sit, that's the mark of craftsmanship.