Asymmetric Bars

[reach4thelasers]

I noticed a few issues with the way bars are rendered:

If you set the border of the bars to transparent then zoom out, most of them become asymmetric. Some have their wicks aligned to the left or right. (see attachement)

Secondly, with border set to transparent, candles which open and close at the same price are presented as a single line showing only the wick, it is impossible to see if the candle is a is a doji or a bullish gravestone or bearish gravestone. (see attachement - examples indicated by lines) These three bars types indicate extreme and polar opposite price action - not being able to see which which one has formed is not acceptable.... I had to turn the borders back on.

Both problems could be solved by permitting a different border colour for up bars and down bars. Meaning the border could be made the same colour as the body. That being said, it would be nice if the borders became the same colour as the body automatically when zoomed far-out, presently the bar turns all white (see attachement) which isn't helpful. For comparison I attached a screenshot of another platform which removes the borders.

[NinjaTrader_PatrickG]

I can reproduce off-center wicks on my end and will have submitted this to the development team for review. We are tracking this as QA-2890. Thanks for bringing this to our attention.

I will submit a feature request for separate up and down bar outline configuration.

[NinjaTrader_PatrickG]

After analysis, the behavior of off-center wicks is expected in this scenario. The root of the issue is that you cannot divide an even number of pixels to display something precisely in the middle because pixels cannot be split.

It only becomes apparent when the outline is transparent because there is logic in place that offsets the outline by 1 pixel onto the actual bar when the actual bar width would be an even number of pixels.

We could potentially force bars to only be an odd number of pixels wide, but this may introduce other issues.

We are tracking your candlestick outline feature request as SFT-2127

[reach4thelasers]

Ok thanks for looking into it Patrick.

Its lucky the developer you spoke to doesn't work for me.... If one of my engineers ever told me something like that was "expected behavior" I would probably fix it myself to make a point and then put him on performance management. Lazy! But hey, I'm just a user here :-)

[eDanny]

I see nothing wrong with that reply. Patrick gave a perfectly sound explanation which in my mind is accurate.

[reach4thelasers]

I've got no problem with Patrick or his answer - I already knew what the root-cause was. There are ways around the fact that pixels cannot be halved. "Leave it Crooked" isn't one.

If every software company took that approach then nothing on the web or on our computers would line up properly and everything would look awful. Open up Microsoft word, type a symmetric letter like A M W, shrink the font size down incrementally - does it go off-centre? Nope. It just needs to be constrained to an odd-number of pixels - this is just something that every designer of software needs to (and usually does) accommodate.

There are a handful of unsolved problems in Computer Science. Indivisible pixels is not one.