Customized Plot Titles and Enhanced Annotations

Since very often EMME/2 plots are integrated directly into project reports, many EMME/2 users from non-English speaking countries have asked for some means to produce plots with titles in their own language. But even within the English-speaking countries, the terminology used in transportation planning is not everywhere the same, so that customizing of plot titles could be used to adapt them to the local terminology. Finally, in some applications EMME/2 is sometimes used in "unorthodox" ways, in which the contents of the data does not at all correspond to the titles that are displayed on the plots.

For all these cases, Release 5.0 now offers a set of enhancements to the annotation concept which, among many other possibilities, allow a very general way of customizing plot titles to use other languages or terminology. This development is based on three new features:

• The new switch 18, "use alternate plot titles", can be used to disactivate the standard plot titles. If this switch is set to on, EMME/2 will not generate the standard plot titles, but assumes that customized titles will be provided by means of annotations.
• Three special annotation files ANNOT1, ANNOT2 and ANNOT3 can be used as automatic annotations. The automatic superposition of these annotation is activated and disactivated by the use of the new switches 19, 20 and 21. Besides their use for customized plot titles, they can also be used to put the company logo on each plot or to display background information on the network. Note that, in contrast to other annotations, automatic annotations are displayed before the actual EMME/2 plot is generated and will thus remain in the background.
• Each annotation command contained in an annotation file can now be preceded by a condition. This condition can be an arbitrary expression involving parameters that define the current environment, such as the current scenario, the module, the options chosen within module, the state of the switches and the contents of the graphic command register. This allows an annotation file to "sense" the details of the current graphic environment and to behave accordingly.

Using the above feature, customized plot titles can simply be implemented as an automatic annotation that contains conditional annotation commands for producing all possible plot titles of the EMME/2 system. Along with Release 5.0, annotations files for customized plot titles are provided for the following languages: English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Swedish and Spanish.