davis@pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu ("John E. Davis") (03/06/91)
In article <1991Mar1.220154.29592@news.nd.edu> przemek@liszt.helios.nd.edu (Przemek Klosowski) writes:
I wonder if people out there could recommend a decent plotting program that:
- will accept a simple file with data (but with flexible reading routine,
that does not insist on exactly two numbers per line) and make a
publication quality plot on laser printer.
- has some way of previewing of the plot on PC or Tek terminal (for the
reasons of modifiability I think that I rather prefer a program that uses
a "declarative" description of a plot in a file over a WYSIWYG.)
- would let me add frills (arrows, point, curve, axis and
plot titles) if I need them later
- generate output that is portable and can be included in a LaTeX document
(in either EEPIC, PicTeX or Postscript or bitmap form)
- be itself portable to different machines/operating systems (Unix and MSDOS,
really, but I think I need source code)
[...]
So the bottom line: what do people use to plot their data?
I had this same question about 6 months ago. I also have access to TopDrawer
as well as GnuPlot. However, I found neither program to be what I was looking
for. As a result, I wrote my own program. Some of its features are:
1. Postscript output as well as to TekTronix terminal.
2. Supports up to 10 columns of data in a file.
3. The data file can contain comments as well as plotting commands.
4. The program is interactive: Move the cursor to a screen location
and insert a string.
5. Supports Greek as well as Roman fonts.
6. Loads command files which contain plotting commands as well as other
load commands.
7. Different linestyles as well as 8 different symbols.
8. Does error bars.
9. May be run entirely from the command line: `plot -d tek -b plot.plt'
9. Runs on both VMS and Unix.
etc..
The program does not do 3d and the output must be either to a tektronix
terminal or to a printer capable of handling postscript. At this point, the
documentation is poor and there is no interactive help. However, I am working
on this.
If there is interest in this program, I can post a sample postscript file
generated by the program; then if there is further interest, I can post the
source code on say, comp.vms.sources or make it available for ftp.
While I am at it, I also wrote a more/less paging program which, in my
opinion, is superior to some of the other paging programs. For this reason, I
call it `MOST'. It runs on both VMS and UNIX. I intend to incorporate this
program into the plotting program as a part of interactive help. However, at
this point, it is a standalone program. If there is interest in this, I can
also arrange to have it available for FTP.
--
John
bitnet: davis@ohstpy
internet: davis@pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu