All three of these advances would appear as the same vertical distance on a logarithmic scale. Most charting programs refer to the logarithmic scale as a semi-log scale, because the time axis is still displayed arithmetically.



The chart above uses the 4th-Quarter performance of VeriSign to illustrate the difference in scaling. On the semi-log scale, the distance between 50 and 100 is the same as the distance between 100 and 200. However, on the arithmetic scale, the distance between 100 and 200 is significantly greater than the distance between 50 and 100.