Choosing an attractive linear scale for a graph’s Y Axis

A long time ago I have written a graph module that covered this nicely. Digging in the grey mass gets the following:

• Determine lower and upper bound of the data. (Beware of the special case where lower bound = upper bound!
• Divide range into the required amount of ticks.
• Round the tick range up into nice amounts.
• Adjust the lower and upper bound accordingly.

Lets take your example:

15, 234, 140, 65, 90 with 10 ticks

1. lower bound = 15
2. upper bound = 234
3. range = 234-15 = 219
4. tick range = 21.9. This should be 25.0
5. new lower bound = 25 * round(15/25) = 0
6. new upper bound = 25 * round(1+235/25) = 250

So the range = 0,25,50,…,225,250

You can get the nice tick range with the following steps:

1. divide by 10^x such that the result lies between 0.1 and 1.0 (including 0.1 excluding 1).
2. translate accordingly:
   • 0.1 -> 0.1
   • <= 0.2 -> 0.2
   • <= 0.25 -> 0.25
   • <= 0.3 -> 0.3
   • <= 0.4 -> 0.4
   • <= 0.5 -> 0.5
   • <= 0.6 -> 0.6
   • <= 0.7 -> 0.7
   • <= 0.75 -> 0.75
   • <= 0.8 -> 0.8
   • <= 0.9 -> 0.9
   • <= 1.0 -> 1.0
3. multiply by 10^x.

In this case, 21.9 is divided by 10^2 to get 0.219. This is <= 0.25 so we now have 0.25. Multiplied by 10^2 this gives 25.

Lets take a look at the same example with 8 ticks:

15, 234, 140, 65, 90 with 8 ticks

1. lower bound = 15
2. upper bound = 234
3. range = 234-15 = 219
4. tick range = 27.375
   1. Divide by 10^2 for 0.27375, translates to 0.3, which gives (multiplied by 10^2) 30.
5. new lower bound = 30 * round(15/30) = 0
6. new upper bound = 30 * round(1+235/30) = 240

Which give the result you requested ;-).

—— Added by KD ——

Here’s code that achieves this algorithm without using lookup tables, etc…:

double range = ...;
int tickCount = ...;
double unroundedTickSize = range/(tickCount-1);
double x = Math.ceil(Math.log10(unroundedTickSize)-1);
double pow10x = Math.pow(10, x);
double roundedTickRange = Math.ceil(unroundedTickSize / pow10x) * pow10x;
return roundedTickRange;

Generally speaking, the number of ticks includes the bottom tick, so the actual y-axis segments are one less than the number of ticks.