Treemap 4.1 Documentation

Changing the Layout Parameters

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Main Tab: to choose algorithm, font size, and borders

• The Layout Algorithms

Treemap implements three Layout Algorithms:



• Slice And Dice - Stable and ordered, but poor aspect ratio. It can generate long skinny rectangles, but is very good to compare sets of items side by side. Note the "flip slice and dice option".
• Squarified - Best aspect ratios, Unordered, medium stability. The nodes will move when the size changes.
• Strip - Ordered, pretty good aspect ratios with some exception, medium stability. The nodes move, but not as often as in Squarified Algorithm.

You will find that the best choice of algorithm depends largely on your data and task, so try all three versions using the menu in the "Main" tab.

Note that in all the cases, nodes that have a size of zero will not appear on the screen, and that subtrees that have too many nodes to be drawn will appear black because the 1 pixel border drawn to separate nodes are black.

• Label font size: Making the size = 0, hides the labels but their values remain visible on the cursor activated popup window.
• Border padding: This padding helps see the grouping of nodes in subtrees, but pixels are "lost" with this padding. So reducing the size of the padding may reveal more nodes. Reducing the font size also helps regain pixels.



• Hide borders: will remove ALL borders and padding so that every pixel is dedicated to the painting of nodes. But watch out that adjacent nodes of the same color will appear to be merged. Turning this control on and off several times is helpful to gain an understanding of the structure of the treee and see details as well.



• Restore default settings in Treemap: simply reloads the file you last opened

Legend Tab: To choose size, color, and label attributes

• Label attribute: By selecting "None", all labels will be removed, but you might prefer to set the font size to zero so that the pop-up still displays some information about the node.

• Size attribute: Only numerical attributes will appear in this option box. If the attribute has negative values they will be handled as zero, i.e. the node will not be visible (we plan to offer alternative options such as using the absolute value in Treemap 4.1)

• Color attribute: If you choose a numerical attribute, a color legend and color binning panel will appear. For more information, see Color Binning for Numerical Attributes.

• Linear, Square Root, or Logarithmic options: those are helpful to gain a quick understanding of the data when the distribution is very skewed.

• Color aggregation functions: average, minimum, maximum, and weighted average. This specifies what aggregation function should be used for the current color attribute when the lower levels of the tree are aggregated using the top slider in the filter tab panel. For more information, see Aggregate the Lower Levels of the Tree in the filtering documentation page.

Keyboard Shortcuts: To support keyboard navigation

• The mnemonics for all the menu options are available and are underlined. For example, for file menu, alt+f will make the file menu selected, then 'o' for file open, 'd' directory mapping etc.
  
  
• The keyboard shortcuts are displayed on the menus.
  
  
• Some of the shortcuts that are not displayed are:
  • "Enter" - zooming in the tree
  • "Esc" - Zooming out the tree for the selected node
  • "F1" - help, will give the quick reference for the treemap documentation.
  • "Up Arrow" - highlights the parent node for the selected node.

Questions

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