Re: alternatives to gnuplot ?

On 06/04/06, Stuart Prescott <debian@nanonanonano.net> wrote:

> Hi! i read your thread, it is not a good thead and possible was write by
> someone who don't have patience to learn something new.

As the OP on that thread, I'll jump to my own defence here... I was more than
willing to learn something new -- that's why I was asking for advice on what
was available. Partly, it was a question of finding out what plotting
programs/packages people were using and partly looking at what other
workflows people were using for data management and plotting.

The problem I had was that none of the plotting utilities I had tried were
compatible with my existing workflow (which I had adopted through the use of
tools such as excel and origin) and most were incompatible with the data
formats that I have the datasets in. (these formats weren't that exotic...
csv or tab delimited with a header row, multiple X columns per file etc)

My unwillingness was not to learn, I was just unwilling to reprocess
multi-gigabyte datasets accumulated over some years of research and rewrite
all my dataprocessing scriptss so that the utilities that I had tried out
could even read in the data to begin with. Then there were just he plain bugs
in the packages which stopped you from even changing the window size in which
you were looking at a plot

For the record, I have been using PyX for the six months since that discussion
and I am quite happy with it. It's a steep learning curve (partly due to the
documentation being pretty patchy when it comes to customising symbols and
lines etc and partly through having python as a pre-req) but I'm liking the
results. I've changed my typical workflow to be .dat + .py = .eps and that is
agreeing with me quite well. Importantly, I haven't had to rewrite several
dozen data processing scripts and reformat my data archive to use PyX.

Thanks to those who suggested PyX to me both on- and off-list and provided
some useful resources for learning a little python to get it all happening.
I'm sure the little python scripts I've got to assemble the plots look like a
perl person writing python and would make python aficionados cringe, but they
work for me (TM) :)

Thanks also to those who suggested other tools that I didn't end up running
with... it's all good for the melting pot.

> Xmgrace is a respectable plot application in scientic comunit and you can
> do all that origin makes and even more ! i recommend !!

Read my original post. Many years ago I used xmgr for plotting data during a
summer project and quite liked it, but the versions I had used could not cope
with my data sets without a lot of faffing with either pipes or preprocessing
data into temp files. Not going to happen for me until I change research
directions sufficiently fast as to discard all current datasets and data
processing tools.

> Labpot is a excelente progam to!

I've not been back to look at labplot and qtiplot since my original
investigation of them and there have been several new releases of them since
I did. Hopefully some of the limitations have been removed since then (Stefan
Gerlach, the developer of labplot tells me that they are fixed in versions
newer than the one that I tested). Given that, they are probably worth
looking at again. (Although now I've settled on PyX, I'm unlikely to change
again for a few years... one can't afford the time to learn a new graphing
tool every few months; at some stage one actually needs to get some work done
rather than adapting to the new graphing package du jour.)

best of luck with it!

cheers
Stuart

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