Here’s a little Flot update as we head into the final hours of 2012.

We had hoped to release 0.8-beta before the end of the year, but we’re still working on a couple of last items, postponing the release until early to mid January. Mark spent the holidays cleaning up several time-axis issues, and we’re feeling good about that implementation.

I’ve been busy with the last major project for 0.8, cleaning up canvas-text support. As you may know, Flot has always used HTML divs for its axis labels. Unfortuately this makes it dramatically more difficult to save the plot as an image, and so, earlier in 0.8’s dev cycle, YCharts generously sponsored a migration to canvas text labels.

Having observed them in real-world use for some time, we realized that while canvas labels are a crucial feature, HTML labels make a better default. Among other things, they can be styled and support advanced formatting that would be difficult or impossible to replicate in canvas.

This doesn’t mean that canvas text is going away; we’re simply moving it to a plugin. Once you include the plugin, you need only set a flag on the plot’s options to enable canvas label rendering.

12 of the 18 remaining issues for 0.8 relate to the canvas-text project. Once they’re complete we can enter beta while finishing up the remaining issues, which deal with the website and documentation.

We’re really looking forward to this release, so we can move on to the cool projects that we have planned for 2013. Happy new year!