Anyone know a fairly simple plotting program?

Esben

It will have to be

1) Fairly simple. It's for my wife, and the deadline is near

)
2) Should be able to plot data double logaritmic .
3) Draw a linear or approximate curve through data points..
4) Output the result to screen and some format readable from a LaTeX-output, e.g. jpg.

Any input is welcome

_________________
regards, Esben
True trade is honest, but not merciful. Politics is dishonest, no matter how merciful... and war is neither honest nor merciful.... therefore, choose trade above politics, but politics above war.

kopfarzt · Posted: Tue Aug 05, 2003 2:49 pm Post subject:

I believe gnuplot solves problems 2-4. Perhaps 1 as well :-)

kopfarzt

Jimbow · Posted: Tue Aug 05, 2003 3:20 pm Post subject:

If you need more power (perhaps for coming up with the approximate curve) I suggest you install Octave which is a Matlab knockoff. I believe it can do curve fitting and fancy things like that. It connects directly to gnuplot.

Realistically it will take at least a few hours to get up to speed if you have no previous Octave/Matlab experience. For any program you will need to figure out how to:

1)

2)

3)

IMNSHO the hardest task (by far) is often selecting the right curve fitting function since it depends on having/understanding a model of your data and error sources. One of the easiest ways to go is to convert the data as if preparing for the loglog plot and then doing a simple linear regression (fitting a straight line to the data). But this will not always be the right way to go.
_________________
After Perl everything else is just assembly language.

Esben · Posted: Tue Aug 05, 2003 6:53 pm Post subject:

Thanks for your help... we tried gnuplot, and that seems to work well. Octave would probably be better if we needed to do real curve fitting; however, just drawing a bezier curve through the points are fine for this application.

Again, thanks for your input. I remembered gnuplot as far more difficult to use

_________________
regards, Esben
True trade is honest, but not merciful. Politics is dishonest, no matter how merciful... and war is neither honest nor merciful.... therefore, choose trade above politics, but politics above war.

moomag · n00b Joined: 20 Aug 2003 Posts: 6

What, and no-one mentioned xmgrace? Fantastic plotting program, and most straightforward to use. That pretty much does everything...

meowsqueak · Posted: Thu Aug 28, 2003 5:58 am Post subject:

I too recommend Octave. Once you get used to the matrix representation (a la Matlab) it's a very cool application. Gnuplot works out of the box, but you can use other plotting programs instead.

Octave has a lot hiding under the hood. I used it for designing digital FIR filters for a while - it gave some very nice results.