bjnw@castle.ed.ac.uk (Brian Wylie) (01/25/91)
I (and a number of colleagues) have been searching in vain for a decent
interactive data reduction and (PostScript) graph, and perhaps chart,
production tool under X for workstations. The poor quality and general
paucity of the tools turned up by a local request has been surprising,
so this request has been given a wider distribution. Surely others have
need of such facilities and must have information to share...
What seems to be required to bring the workstation products up to those
in the PC market, would require the majority (and preferably all) of the
following characteristics:
* X-based display, with appropriate menus;
* a range of basic format options for graphs, plots, bar/pie-charts;
* properly encapsulated PS output, making full use of PS fonts;
* data-reduction or analysis (maybe a spreadsheet) with curve-fitting;
* maybe even 3D mapping, etc.
I'm familiar with a number of packages which provide *some* desired
functionality, though generally fall far short of most. Some thoughts are:
* Uniras (lousey, pretty much unusable PostScript);
* grtool (SunView with a nice WIMP-interface and lots of data-reduction
facilities, but ugly PostScript output);
* xvgr (pre-release X version of grtool, limited to XView?);
* xgraph (extremely limited X front to basic X unix utility);
* gnuplot (limited output format capability and hardly interactive);
I understand why there should be some difference of quality between
bought PC products and free X ones, but is it really that great?
If you can suggest any tools which you consider improvements over those
described, or which might meet the specification required (even partly),
please attempt to mail me the details (to ensure that they get to me)
and I promise to post a summary -- if I get any replies.
Slainte, "Let he who hath understanding reckon the number of
Brian. the \baselinestretch ..." --- The Book of Lamport