Plotting small values in Workbench

Bugs
1

Expected behavior

Having plotted a workspace/spectrum containing small numbers (<1E-4) I should be able to rescale it manually. For example I may want y=0 at the bottom.

Actual behavior

The plot settings dialog “Lower limit” and “Upper limit” only allows fixed point entry and a maximum of 4 decimal places. It is very reluctant to accept E or e for scientific notation and having done so, on re-entering the dialog it has re-rounded the number to fixed point.

Steps to reproduce the behavior

Generate a workspace with small Y numbers (mine is a suitably normalised Dark Counts run). Plot it (spectrum line plot or colour plot). Open the settings and try to rescale it.
To enter scientific notation it is necessary to ensure the content of the field is a valid number at all times. So type “1.5”, then move the cursor back and insert “e” and then “-” to get “1.e-5”. Alternatively pasting a fully formed number from elsewhere seems to work.

Platforms affected

Mantid 4.1, Workbench. Tried on Windows, probably all.

2
3

A variation of this seems to have appeared. In a colour fill plot, if I’m adjusting the colour scale range it sometimes adjusts the other end of the range as I’m typing such that the range is always positive.

For example if I enter the dialog with Min=15000 and Max=80000. I select the contents of the “Max” box and start to type 70000. As I press 7 the Min box changes to 6.9900 !

This is very annoying!

A worse example. Another workspace has initial colour range 0.2266 to 0.3476. I select the contents of Max and start to type 0.25.
Press 0: Min changes to 0.0000 and Max to 0.0100 with the cursor just after the initial 0
Press “.”: the cursor moves over the “.” that was already there
Subsequent key presses “2” and “5” are ignored since it thinks it has enough digits.

4

Created an issue for this Colorscale limit check Remove or delay · Issue #27575 · mantidproject/mantid · GitHub

5

This issue has been fixed and will be in the next Nightly version of Mantid (Should be the next few days) Remove check that max value is greater than min value in the figure options images tab by PhilColebrooke · Pull Request #27579 · mantidproject/mantid · GitHub