[Bioperl-l] Bio::Graphics::Panel gridlines and pixels

[Mitch Skinner]

Hello,

I'm working on an AJAX version of GBrowse (http://genome.biowiki.org), 
where we're pre-rendering entire chromosomes by breaking them up into 
tiles.  One of the problems we have is that it takes a long time to 
render all those tiles.  One of the things that's slowing the process 
down (and using lots of RAM) is rendering the gridlines, and it would 
make things a lot easier (and faster) for us if we could assume that the 
gridlines were the same for each tile.  Since we're only rendering at a 
particular set of zoom levels (that we have control over), I think this 
is a reasonable assumption.

Given the right set of zoom levels, the assumption works almost all the 
time, except for one specific case.  It has to do with the way draw_grid 
and map_pt in Bio::Graphics::Panel work for the very first gridline.

Here's how draw_grid (in CVS HEAD) computes the first gridline:

    my $first_tick = $minor * int($self->start/$minor);

$first_tick, $minor and $self->start are in base-pair space, which is 
1-based.  However, if ($self->start < $minor) then $first_tick is 0.  
This might not be a problem, except that $first_tick is translated into 
pixel coordinates in map_pt, which expects 1-based bp coordinates.  Here 
are the relevant lines in map_pt:

    my $val = $flip 
      ? int (0.5 + $pr - ($length - ($_- 1)) * $scale)
      : int (0.5 + ($_-$offset-1) * $scale);

This style of rounding only works for positive numbers; rounding 0.6 by 
doing int(0.5 + 0.6) gives you 1 as expected, but rounding -0.6 by doing 
int(0.5 + -0.6) gives you 0.  So if the first three gridlines are at 0, 
10, and 20 bp, then (assuming $scale is 1, $offset is 0, $flip evaluates 
false, and pad left is 0) they're drawn at pixels 0, 9, and 19.

I think that there should be gridlines at pixels 0, 10, and 20.  The 
fact that currently the first interval is 9 pixels and the second is 10 
pixels is breaking my hopeful assumption about the gridlines.

AFAICT my problems are solved if we make two changes:
change the above line from draw_grid to this:
    my $first_tick = 1 + $minor * int(($start - 1)/$minor);
and change the lines from map_pt to this:

    my $val = $flip 
      ? ($pr - ($length - ($_- 1)) * $scale)
      : (($_-$offset-1) * $scale);
    $val = int($val + .5 * ($val <=> 0));

Does this make sense?  If people agree that these changes are right then 
I can also produce a proper patch if y'all would prefer that.

Regards,
Mitch