Re: Best plotting software?

[David Z Maze <dmaze@debian.org>]

Try KDE <trykde@rogers.com> writes:
> I'm looking for such a software that takes arrays of scientific data
> and spit out a gif file consisting of chart or pie picture (like what
> you'd often see on a benchmark site?). Any suggestions?

<doom-and-gloom>
Sadly, the best approach for doing that sort of thing I've found has
been to take the array of data and write a Perl script that spits out
a PostScript file.  gnuplot is just okay for what it does, but even
moderately complex things seem hard to do without doing a lot of
massaging of the data.  (For example, we generate two different
results for each of a dozen benchmarks, make a plot that looks like
this:

  IPC |
    4 |             O             X - Unoptimized
      |      XO     O     XO      O - Optimized
    2 |  O   XO     O     XO
      | XO   XO    XO     XO
    0 +-----------------------
       gcc  perl tomcatv bzip2

...except with solid colored bars instead of ASCII art.)  If this is
easy to do in gnuplot, or if there's some other tool that can
trivially do this given a text file, I'd also be interested in
knowing...
</>

-- 
David Maze         dmaze@debian.org      http://people.debian.org/~dmaze/
"Theoretical politics is interesting.  Politicking should be illegal."
	-- Abra Mitchell