OT Graphing software

When "pretty pictures" are my only need, I simply use PSpice Probe and feed it PWL's (the data). ...Jim Thompson

--
| James E.Thompson                                 |    mens     | 
| Analog Innovations                               |     et      | 
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems  |    manus    | 
| San Tan Valley, AZ 85142     Skype: skypeanalog  |             | 
| Voice:(480)460-2350  Fax: Available upon request |  Brass Rat  | 
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com |    1962     | 
              
I love to cook with wine.     Sometimes I even put it in the food.

I mostly need it for publication type stuff, newsletters, manuals, talks.. etc. Qtiplot looks OK.

It says it's free if compiled from the source, or you can pay a subscription. (Maybe compiling a windows version is hard.)

George H.

You haven't described the type of pictures, data, nor the format it's in.

Have a look at: and see if the sorts of pictures it creates are in line with what you're expecting.

That looks "cutey" ;-) ...Jim Thompson

--
| James E.Thompson                                 |    mens     | 
| Analog Innovations                               |     et      | 
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems  |    manus    | 
| San Tan Valley, AZ 85142     Skype: skypeanalog  |             | 
| Voice:(480)460-2350  Fax: Available upon request |  Brass Rat  | 
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com |    1962     | 
              
I love to cook with wine.     Sometimes I even put it in the food.

Perhaps a broader set of examples, here:

Thanks Don, Do you use Gnuplot? Most of the time I'm just sticking 2-D data in a plot, with maybe a little spread sheet type manipulation. I sometimes need a fitting function. (but origin (at least my old version) is not great here... I've had to write my own functions sometimes.) For publication I need to be able to easily resize and move the titles, captions, data point sizes. It is a lot about making the data pretty, and not just plotting it so I can look at it.

I like the look of the qtiplot thing.. it looks like Origin, which means a short learning curve for me. And I do have some "canned" origin files that I use again and again for sending instrument data. George H.

Maybe this might be interesting:

and maybe:

Glenn

On 21/04/15 21.46, George Herold wrote: ...

Hi George

Octave can do curve fitting (like MatLab):

Search:

Curve fitting in matlab:

Non-Linear Fitting Using GNU/Octave And leasqr:

Curve fitting A: [not limited to] Linear Least Squares:

(contains Octave and MatLab code examples)

Glenn

Thanks Glenn, Octave looks nice. But maybe too much. It looks to be a full blown math package.. and not so much about plotting.

George H.

Octave can use gnuplot or it's own plotting

That'll give you all sorts of fitting/data manipulation/file handling/etc. with easy scripting

-Lasse

I use gnumeric, mostly a Linux spreadsheet utility, but it has good graphing capability, too. Can import/export Excel files, if you want.

I used to use NeXS, which was even a little bit better, but their support was pretty much nonexistant, and was quite unknown. gnumeric now will do just about anything I could do in NeXS, and it is currently maintained and supported. It can be run under Windows, as well.

Jon

I used to use it. I've now moved most of my "data visualization" tasks to Mathematica. But, don't consider that a "knock" against gnuplot.

I didn't look through all the examples that I suggested. Gnuplot can take "tabular" data and plot it, as well. For the most part, I (now) use Mathematica to draw functions so I don't have to manually evaluate them at N different points -- saves me time and ensures the resulting plots are exactly what I wanted them to be (eliminates any typos in long lists of data that I might have had to prepare, otherwise)

IME, this tends to be an iterative exercise: you decide where you

*think* legends should appear, generate the plot, then grumble because the plot overlapped the legend and you've got to tweek it a bit. Aside from the annoyance, it's not a big deal.

I have been *DISappointed* with Mathematica's "labeling", in many cases. But, when I'm putting something in a publication, it is often easier to just "layer" text on top of the graph -- this ensures the fonts agree with those in the body of the publication, etc. Nits.

Only you can tell what sort of effort that would require given your data and abilities. I found gnuplot (has many examples in the source code distribution -- including a regression test suite) to be pretty easy to come up to speed. Like anything, if you use it often (enough), it becomes second nature. Walking away from it for a long period of time and coming back to it usually results in some initial stumbles. But, tweak the input and try again -- its not like there are lives at stake! :>

Exactly. I left gnuplot in favor of Mathematica when I needed more advanced capabilities. But "plotting" is what gnuplot strives to do.

+1 for Gnuplot. It's also scriptable, and you can control it over a pipe.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

D

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r

tions, data point sizes. It is a lot about making the data pretty,

ion.html

easqr/

Thanks Glenn, Yeah I'm afraid Matlab, Octave, may be too much software for me. I'll waste too much time playing, where right now I just want a tool for making graphs pretty. For small size graphs (1/2 the standard page width.) I always want to make things bigger. I figure I'll order the qtiplot, I'll post some pretty pictures when I get more data.

George H.

Dear Phil, Don, others. Thanks, (I started writing... but just repeating myself.)

George H.

George,

I would *strongly* suggest you at least explore gnuplot. It's free and easy to install (unlike most Windows programs, you basically just copy the files onto your machine!)

A quick read of: would give you an idea of what it would "cost" you to poke at it for a few minutes. I would be surprised if you didn't have the demos running 3 minutes after you downloaded it! If you decide it's not appropriate, just delete the files -- no silly registry hacking or fancy uninstall scripts, etc.

I can't say what it would take to have *your* needs met (post your data??) but don't imagine it would be all that difficult.

For ad-hoc graphs from data files I liked veusz

As an example (I think) I used it for this:

But it can do a lot more as shown on the website. Free and cross-platform.

Another one of those things where everyone has their own favorite.

--

John Devereux

Oh I like gnuplot also, I tend to use that especially when I have a script doing automated measurements

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John Devereux