[278] in Software_Announce
gnu plot utils installed
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Matthew Belmonte)
Fri Feb 19 10:32:46 1999
Date: Fri, 19 Feb 1999 10:31:13 -0500 (EST)
From: belmonte@MIT.EDU (Matthew Belmonte)
To: bug-sipb@MIT.EDU, software-announce@MIT.EDU
I've installed the gnu plot utilities in the sipb locker. (Note that the gnu
plot utilities are not at all the same as gnuplot. gnuplot is an interactive
plotting program from Dartmouth; the gnu plot utilities are library code and
associated programs that implement batch-oriented, device-independent plotting
of two-dimensional data.) The plot utilties allow you to use a single syntax
to generate output in any of several formats -- PostScript, xfig, Adobe
Illustrator -- you can even make them output the drawing to an X window.
You can also write your own programs and link them against gnu libplot, the gnu
extended version of libplot, around which the plot utilities are built. The
corresponding header file is /mit/sipb/include/plot.h.
These programs are cool. I've used them to generate the figures in several
technical papers, and have found it very easy to translate raw numbers into
figures and to format or reformat these for various journals. See
/mit/sipb/info/plotutils.info for detailed information on how to use the plot
utilities.
The main program in the plot utilities, and the only one that most people ever
need to use, is named "graph". On Solaris systems, you'll have to re-order
your search path or use an explicit pathname in order to avoid getting
/usr/bin/graph.
