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Not to propagate the never-ending Apple vs. Linux vs. Windows war any further, perhaps the reason is that Apple spends more time on developing their operating systems than Linux developers and/or Microsoft. The result, is that you get a product where apps just work. Consider this. I just compiled and installed Gnuplot on my MacBook Pro. I really wanted to find a binary or a DMG file on the internet somewhere, so that I didn't have to compile. Because my experience in Linux with downloading and compiling stuff usually (9 times out of 10) results in spending the better part of two hours trying to figure out dependencies and downloading and installing additional software, ad nauseum. On OS X, I had gnuplot compiled, installed, and working in less than two minutes! Ok, so some variants of Linux are getting better at this, such as Opensuse's Yast, which is really just their answer to Apple's App Store. Which brings me to another point -- does anybody ever wonder why everyone keeps copying Apple? Probably the same reason most of the jocks copied the nerd's papers in 4th grade,. . .

LyX. I wrote a thesis in it and didn't have to resort to any manual interventions in the generated LaTeX. Couple it with SVG diagrams, generated by inkscape, and you have a seamless authoring system that handles both text and graphics. SVG means there is no messy task of keeping source and postscript output synchronised (just right click a diagram within LyX to edit the SVG source with inkscape). Use gnuplot to generate your (postscript) graphs and you have pretty well a complete authoring system. A few years ago, LyX and inkscape were too immature to use seriously, but they have matured. I recommend the combination.

they don't, for example, find anything useful at sites ending in .info

Really?

Having tried to get involved a few years back, I think I know why. While I don't deny the extree skill of some of the gnu programmers, GCC, Emacs and Gnuplot are ample evidence of this, [snip]

Ah, gnuplot has nothing to do with GNU or the FSF. From the gnuplot FAQ

Any reference to GNUplot is incorrect. The real name of the program is "gnuplot". You see people use "Gnuplot" quite a bit because many of us have an aversion to starting a sentence with a lower case letter, even in the case of proper nouns and titles. gnuplot is not related to the GNU project or the FSF in any but the most peripheral sense. Our software was designed completely independently and the name "gnuplot" was actually a compromise.

and

1.7 Does gnuplot have anything to do with the FSF and the GNU project?

Gnuplot is neither written nor maintained by the FSF. It is not covered by the General Public License, either. It used to be distributed by the FSF, however, due to licensing issues it is no longer.

Gnuplot is freeware in the sense that you don't have to pay for it. However it is not freeware in the sense that you would be allowed to distribute a modified version of your gnuplot freely. Please read and accept the Copyright file in your distribution.

Gnuplot?

http://www.gnuplot.info/

gnuplot.info?

Scientific problems, sure. It's not designed for that any more than GNUCash is. But let's not generalize, twitter. It's actually one of Microsoft's better products.

For complex charting and plotting I really like GNUPlot.

As for error bars, I have to admit that I use Gnuplot rather than spreadsheets for a lot of my plots, and if any Gnuplot developers are out there, support for the OOo format for plots would be appreciated ... it would be nice to be able to just open a gnuplot graph in 'Draw and annotate there.

I think you are right in that point, a picture may be worth a thousand words, but it doesn't necessarily transmit the needed information. I believe visualization is one of the most important tools in research, not for displaying information to others, but to understand the result and implications of our own research. I use Gnuplot to check my results. Very often a glance at the graphic is enough to tell us something is wrong. "Hey, what's that spike over there?"

OTOH, when you need to transmit information, graphics should be carefully thought out. Unfortunately, engineers and scientists aren't graphic artists, and artists normally don't know enough about technology to create the most useful graphics.

For me, a good author in this field is Edward Tufte, specifically this book and this one and this one. In one of these, Tufte demonstrates how the cause of cholera was discovered using a street map of London and how the O-ring failure that destroyed the space shuttle Challenger was known beforehand, but was ignored because the engineers were unable to present their arguments in a clear way.

 

http://www.gnuplot.info/faq/faq.html says: "Gnuplot is freeware in the sense that you don't have to pay for it. However it is not freeware in the sense that you would be allowed to distribute a modified version of your gnuplot freely. Please read and accept the Copyright file in your distribution." Further, http://www.gnuplot.info/faq/faq.html#SECTION000310 00000000000000 says: "gnuplot is copyrighted, but freely distributable; you don't have to pay for it." "gnuplot is not related to the GNU project or the FSF in any but the most peripheral sense. Our software was designed completely independently and the name "gnuplot" was actually a compromise."

http://www.gnuplot.info/faq/faq.html says: "Gnuplot is freeware in the sense that you don't have to pay for it. However it is not freeware in the sense that you would be allowed to distribute a modified version of your gnuplot freely. Please read and accept the Copyright file in your distribution." Further, http://www.gnuplot.info/faq/faq.html#SECTION000310 00000000000000 says: "gnuplot is copyrighted, but freely distributable; you don't have to pay for it." "gnuplot is not related to the GNU project or the FSF in any but the most peripheral sense. Our software was designed completely independently and the name "gnuplot" was actually a compromise."

If you're primarily interested in Plotting data and not so much in number crunching, you can try using:
Gnuplot http://www.gnuplot.info/ or
PyXPlot http://www.pyxplot.org.uk/ Granted you'll have to learn the scripting language, but the graphs are way more consistently rendered and 'cleaner' compared to what Excel generates.

Stupid pointy-hairs and their desire for data visualization.

Gnuplot is neither written nor maintained by the FSF. It is not covered by the General Public License, either....

Gnuplot is freeware in the sense that you don't have to pay for it. However it is not freeware in the sense that you would be allowed to distribute a modified version of your gnuplot freely. Please read and accept the Copyright file in your distribution.

I use several .info addresses. Many municipalities use them, e.g. http://lacounty.info/. Some GNU/FSF programs use them, like Gnuplot: http://www.gnuplot.info/. Other open-source projects like Fedora (which predates the Fedora Linux distribution) use them: http://www.fedora.info/

According to a datataker forum post in response to a question about the DT515 Linux:

The dataTaker transmits and receives simple ASCII commands. You can use any simple terminal program to program and recive data from a Datataker data logger.

Wonder if this would work for the DT80. If you connect using a serial cable you can use the Linux cu command (something like "cu --parity=none -s 115200 -l /dev/ttyS0") to capture the ASCII data.

From there you can probably pipe into gnuplot

Always happy to help anyone move to Linux.

The horrible truth is that graphing, in general, tends to suck in all office packages. Back in the DOS era, I was a schoolkid and the only thing we had that could make graphs was Works, and it was really pain after a while (and this was just school project stuff, nothing as glorious as 10000 item plots); then, for me, came a long lull of not needing to do any graphing, and recently, now that I've had to fight Excel and OO.o, they've made the whole thing "easier" and almost impossible to use effectively for anything

Nowadays I keep going back to GNUPLOT if I want to graph something. Pain to work with (no "click and it does it"), but at least it gives understandable output without too much messing. Export stuff to CSV from OpenOffice.org Calc, let GNUPLOT shred it for a while, and it spits out EPS. Works perfectly each time, plus the graphs it makes have "dull scientific" look rather than "idiotic business" look, and I prefer dull scientific look any day =)

Gnuplot. Gri. R w/ gnuplot. Octave w/ gnuplot. Asymptote with LaTeX. etc. etc.

I produced many, many, many data analyses and so forth along with heavy scientific charting requirements using tools like that finishing up my chemistry degree. (Gnuplot and octave in particular I got a lot of mileage out of.)

Most of those should be able to export the graphs from your analyzed data into something like a png, eps, etc. that you can then embed in your word-processing program's report/paper document.

Frankly, as a scientist, Word kind of sucks, and Excel is a really shitty platform for data analysis for anything more complex than sophmore-level undergrad labs. At the least, using a dedicated analysis and charting tool or set of tools is like a breath of fresh air after dealing with Excel's cramped, business-oriented data toolset.

We've written some self-rolled C code and Perl scripts to pull data from the Weatherduck, stuff it into a Postgres database, and trigger an alarm if the temperature or humidity get outside a certain range. Here's a link to our CVSWeb.

The basic procedure is that you pipe output from monitor into db_interface, and then run alert as a separate process. You can use the CGI script to generate GNUPlot graphs from a web form, or you can invoke it directly with graph.

gnuplot is good all sorts of arbitrary graphs, but you will have to read up on its syntax to learn how to use it - no nice GUIs. But it will produce very nice postscript output that looks quite sharp when printed.

Although it's more a graphing tool, it's flexible enough to do charts, with a little work. Fortunately, there are scripts like Barchart that do most of the heavy lifting for you.

gnuplot homepage

It has a learning curve, since it is mostly commandline based, but if you're in university you should be able to figure it out... I hope.

If you want to make consistent looking graphs, with minimal effort, use GNUPLOT. Great piece of software.

www.gnuplot.info

True. Maple is a commercial property. After a little research, I found a product called gnuplot that may be of interest. http://www.gnuplot.info/

For graphing, I use gnuplot. It can do 2D/3D graphing and is quite easy to learn/use. For statistics/regression, I use R

$ gnuplot
gnuplot> plot 'datafile.txt'
gnuplot> plot 'datafile.txt' usi 1:2, 'datafile.txt' using 1:3

LaTeX produces the most visually attractive documents out there--there's no reason not to use it.

I mostly write technical documents. troff takes less effort to write, I'll continue using that instead of AbiWord/OpenOffice/MS Word. WYSIWYG is generally not that useful if you do mainly structured documents or if you need fine control of typesetting. Typesetting languages with the right scripts are generally the easiest. If you need purely structured documents then DocBook-SGML is not a bad route to go. (SGML is fancier and more human-friendly than XML, which is what you really want if you are manually editing tags)

Also when doing resumes you really have to make sure that the resume looks correct in Wordpad, Word97 and Office2k/XP. Seems that these are what recruiters use (wordpad appearing to be the most common). Hint: save as word97 RTF and rename .rtf to .doc. This will make it load correctly in wordpad, without getting too fancy/bizarre on the formatting that Office2K likes to put in.

Recruiters seem to hate PDFs (I guess they prefer file formats with macro viruses). Although I've had a great deal of luck with HTML. Mostly I just do my resume in troff and provide it as PDF to the manager/engineers and HTML to the recruiters and everyone is happy.

Guide to doing your resume in troff (and taking advantage of macros to painlessly customize your resume).
Your Resume: Part 1 Your Resume: Part 2

If you do a lot of technical documents these tools work well with troff (or LaTeX):
Graphviz for doing automated diagrams
Gnuplot for doing scientific graphing (it can output postscript and ascii)
TGIF a 2-d drawing tool with a light-weigh intuitive UI.
gEDA for schematics and pcb layout
xcircuit extremely powerful 2-d drawing tool. originally designed for schematics, but is useful for any sort of diagram.

Also if you were wondering: Résumé == Curriculum vitae (CV)

There is: gnuplot, an utterly wonderful little program. I use it all the time.

• Abiword - Word processor, supports .doc, .rtf, GPL.
• Open Office - Whole Office suite, including a database frontend and BASIC macro language.
• Perl - Scripting language
• Python - Scripting language
• Cygwin - UNIX emulator. Can create Windows programs, reliant on a cygwin1.dll.
• MinGW - Port of some of the UNIX utilities (BASH, gcc, vi...) to Windows.
• djgpp - UNIX emulator for DOS.
• Mozilla, Firefox, Thunderbird - Web browser, e-mail client, IRC client, lots more.
• Filezilla - FTP client.
• xchat - IRC client.
• putty, pscp, psftp and others - Telnet/SSH clients.
• Gaim - Client for IRC/Yahoo/MSN/ICQ/AIM and more.
• gzip - Compression (usually better than .zip).
• tar - Extracts/Makes tar archives.
• bzip2 - Totally ace compression (usually better than gzip).
• Info-ZIP - Support for .zip. Good free substitute for Winzip.
• 7-zip - Support for multiple compression formats.
• frhed - Hex editor
• Ext2fs - Several programs for doing Ext2 under Windows.
• Antiword - Converts documents out of the proprietary .doc format.
• MySQL - RDBMS.
• Apache - Web/Proxy server
• sendmail - Mail server
• squid - Proxy server
• freeamp - Audio player
• winlame - MP3 encoder
• cd-ex - MP3/OGG encoder?
• gimp - Very detailed graphics program.
• imagemagick - Graphic manipulation. Provides the 'convert' utility under UNIX.
• freeciv - Civilisation clone.
• gnuplot - Plotting package.
• TightVNC - A fork of VNC, with enhancements.
• RealVNC - The original VNC.
• rdesktop - Access Windows Terminal Services and Remote Desktops.
• Nmap - Well known port scanner.
• John the Ripper - Password cracker. Does NT and MD5.

It looks good, but I'm skeptical about its usefulness for me. ROOT already produces damn good output and fills most of my needs. And for everything else there's gnuplot.

But I will look at kst. If it's as good as they say it is, I may use it instead of gnuplot.

For me, the best feature of gnuplot was the pslatex terminal, which allows you to let LaTeX take care of typesetting the labels, legends and so forth, making the graph you include look much more integrated into your document than including just a plain .eps exported from some other software. Apparently there is now also an epslatex terminal, and I would be interested to find out what benefits using this instead has.

On a side note, xfig allows the creation of simple diagrams with LaTeX formatted captions. Together, these programs take care of making the prettiest figures in your document, though I'd like to know about any other software that produces split PostScript/LaTeX files.

For me, the best feature of gnuplot was the pslatex terminal, which allows you to let LaTeX take care of typesetting the labels, legends and so forth, making the graph you include look much more integrated into your document than including just a plain .eps exported from some other software. Apparently there is now also an epslatex terminal, and I would be interested to find out what benefits using this instead has.

On a side note, xfig allows the creation of simple diagrams with LaTeX formatted captions. Together, these programs take care of making the prettiest figures in your document, though I'd like to know about any other software that produces split PostScript/LaTeX files.

Please note that despite it's name, gnuplot has nothing to do with the FSF and the GNU project. It's not even released under the GPL. In fact it's not even Free Software, since it's license doesn't allow distribution of a modified version of the program.

You can read this in the gnuplot FAQ

Actually, you used gnuplot, not GNU Plot. See here

From that link:

Any reference to GNUplot is incorrect. The real name of the program is "gnuplot". You see people use "Gnuplot" quite a bit because many of us have an aversion to starting a sentence with a lower case letter, even in the case of proper nouns and titles. gnuplot is not related to the GNU project or the FSF in any but the most peripheral sense. Our software was designed completely independently and the name "gnuplot" was actually a compromise. I wanted to call it "llamaplot" and Colin wanted to call it "nplot." We agreed that "newplot" was acceptable but, we then discovered that there was an absolutely ghastly pascal program of that name that the Computer Science Dept. occasionally used. I decided that "gnuplot" would make a nice pun and after a fashion Colin agreed.

Personally, llamaplot would have been better, and I think we should patition them to change their name to it.

But thank you for a couple of programs I have not used before. I'm looking forward to mucking around with them now.

Oh, and yes I am a member of the GNU team.

And by yes I am, I mean no I am not.

1. One Wire Weather station from AAG.
   
2. Excellent free software to run it.
   
3. gnuplot to plot the results.
   
4. Post the information to The Weather Underground
   

gnuplot ?

I wanted to call it "llamaplot" and Colin wanted to call it "nplot." We agreed that "newplot" was acceptable but, we then discovered that there was an absolutely ghastly pascal program of that name that the Computer Science Dept. occasionally used. I decided that "gnuplot" would make a nice pun and after a fashion Colin agreed.

I would write a simple gnuplot script. Fast and easy to use.

Use gnuplot.

Just like all software, this should be "the best tool for the job." It is often determined by arbitrary personal preferences and resource availabilities (using Matlab over Mathematica just because there are licenses laying around).

I've done some genetics work using combinations of Matlab, Perl and C. I used Matlab for the heavy algorithmic implementation, with the really intense bits in C, and Perl to do the pre/post-processing. I've also used the Simulink package in Matlab to do some chemical signal modelling.

I've used the above software on combinations of Intel/Windows and SPARC/Solaris platforms (my employer didn't mind if I burned CPUs over the weekend). In that case, taking advantage of all that hardware (a few million $s worth) influenced my choice of language/toolkit. I know that a lot of quantitative analysts seem partial to C++. Many professors, especially the older crowd, use a lot of FORTRAN. One guy I know, doing high-energy work at CERN, uses Java. Some students, when I was an undergrad (late 90s), used something called IDL (maybe it's "Interactive Data Language") to process some astronomical data.

As another poster mentioned, physicists (which is mainly the category I fall into) tend not to trust any off-the-shelf stuff (hardware or software) and will typically look to build things themselves (or at least understand what they've bought in intense detail). Although, I've never gotten involved in serious computational physics (other than typical post-processing and visualization on data I've collected).

One statistical mechanics grad student knew all the details of the least-squares and regression implementations in Excel. Actually, you'd be surprised how many people will use Excel for simple calculations and visualization. It's quick and easy, once you know what you're doing, so why mess around doing it with GNUPlot or something else (which is equally/more efficient, but is another tool to learn)?

In the end, whatever requires the least amount of the researcher's time is the best solution. A little extra computing time (in many, but not all, cases) is negligble when compared to the time spent coding. The UI doesn't need to be slick, the performance (probably) doesn't need to be great (except for detector software that's generally real-time). All that matters is that the results are correct/accurate (and hopefully repeatable).

Don't tell anyone, but I think I have found a secret way to control the spiders by using gnuplot...