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Histograms when Dynamic Updating is Disabled

W. Craig Carter, MIT
Posted 11 years ago
Hello,
I just finished trying to figure out something that wasn't working for me that I want to share. It's not a bug, but a "gotcha".

Turn off Dynamic Enabled from the menu item Evaluation. Suppose that you had done this earlier and forgotten about the fact that Dynamic was disabled.

Run this:
Histogram[RandomVariate[NormalDistribution[0, 1], 200]]
You will get a histogram that you might not expect:

I was confused by this, until I did a haphazard MouseOver the gray region.

It seems reasonable to me that Histogram should show a representative graphic that doesn't require tooltips when Dynamic is off.
Does this seem reasonable to others?
POSTED BY: W. Craig Carter
4 Replies
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It seems that Histogram is doing two Dynamic things.  First is to display the tooltip when mousing over a bar, and the second is to change the hilighting of the edges of the bar's rectangle when mousing over.  Looking at the InputForm of the resulting graphics shows this.    Various other visualization functions also do things like this (e.g., PieChart, etc...).  

I agree with you that having the option to turn off Dynamic elements of these graphics makes good sense.  I'd vote for this to be implemented as an option rther than as an automatic response to whether Dynamic updateing is on or off.  So An Option like DynamicElements->True|False makes a lot of sense to me.
POSTED BY: David Reiss
Such option exists - it is:
PerformanceGoal -> "Speed"
- once set the interactive graphics will not fail with Dynamic Updating is Disabled.
POSTED BY: Sam Carrettie
But for some graphics that then compromises the actual form of the resulting graphic.
POSTED BY: David Reiss
In my particular case, I  forgot that Dynamic Updating was disabled.  Thus, I was interpreting the gray block as a "wrong" histogram.

Of course, the blame is on me for forgetting.

Moreover, if I had known what I was looking for, the documentation would have given me the solution; however, if I had known what I was looking for, I wouldn't need the documentation.

Perhaos. others might have run into this before and spent a bit of time resolving the puzzle.
POSTED BY: W. Craig Carter
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