On Thu, 6 Apr 2006, Bill Allombert wrote:
Dear Debian-Science, I am looking for a GNU GPL-compatibly licensed alternative to gnuplot, preferably packaged in Debian.
What gnuplot capabilities do you need (3D, curve fitting, flexible output formats, limited programming) and what capabilities does it lack (e.g., why are you looking elsewhere)?
Do you have experiences with some of them ?
I'm one of the developers of a package that originally used gnuplot back in the OS/2 days when we needed a simple, portable, plotting package with curve fitting that could be used on unix, OS/2, and Windows 3.x.
These days I recommend R over gnuplot because it runs on most popular systems and has excellent user-community support, but for linux there are other languages with plotting capabilities. Python has been mentioned, but I'll add GDL (gnudatalanguage) and fl (very new, license not yet announced, but time-limited demos are available), two clones of IDL. IDL originated about the same time as Matlab, so feels "comfortable" to people who stated out with Fortran, and is handy if you need to work with binary data files (images). The IDL user community is helpful and supportive of newcomers, but is much smaller than the R community.
-- George N. White III <aa056@chebucto.ns.ca>