Evaluations of Free Scientific Plotting Software?

paulywog asks: "I've used a fair number of non-Free (Beer) scientific plotting packages during college and as an engineer -- including Matlab, SigmaPlot and DeltaGraph, Excel (ick), SAS, my trusty HP 48G, among others. Lately, I've been looking for OSS resources that can provide similar features. Part of the reason is that there are some features that I've wanted, but never been able to get out the other software. One feature in particular: shade the area between two curves or shade the region outlined by error bars on this plot. I'd like to hear what experience other scientists and engineers have with OSS plotting packages in terms of ease of use, power, and flexibility."

Comments

Graphing is great...

[Anonymous Coward]

For me to poop on!

GRI

[JulianK11]

GRI was reviewed by Linux Magizine. It takes in a set of data and puts out a graph maybe that will help

I use R (GNU S-plus clone)

[mbg]

I've been using GNU R for all my scientific plotting and data analysis work the last year or two. While there is supposedly some kind of GUI interface in the works, I do it all from the command line. That way you can automate, script, make things consistent, etc. New, fancy plots are a Simple Matter of Programming.

R is a clone of the statistics programming language/environment S-plus, which was invented at Bell Labs a number of years ago. It's a very nice, interpreted language with elegant support for vectors, functional programming, and even some basic object-orientation.

Grab the source from your nearest CRAN mirror or the Debian package.

OpenDX

[Brodeur]

OpenDX can do just about anything you want. It's an extremely powerful and flexible scientific visualization tool. And IBM has recently opened the source code (under the IBM Public Liscense). There is, however, a considerable learning curve. Check out the gallery.

gnuplot

[NateKid]

I discovered gnuplot a few weeks ago and it changed my life for the better. Gnuplot can be scripted to do whatever you want it do do, output charts in a bunch of formats, and even perform some calculations on data. It used to take me five or ten minutes to come up with a decent Excel graph from a flat text file (I'm not too bright :)). But recently I wrote a short perl script that takes directories of flat text files and generates gnuplot graphs at the rate of 20 per second. Postscript even, so they're ripe for embedding in your latex docs. Pretty nifty stuff (email me if you want it) if you're got reams of data that need to be summarized by your noontime class.
Nate
BTW, The "gnu" in "gnuplot" has nothing to do with the fsf but I still think it's open source.

My choice

[Anonymous Coward]

is a package that is currently beta, but will be release-quality soon, OpenXLS. The program is capable of reading and writing XLS formats, and has some extremely powerful scripting capabilities. RPMs as well as source are available.

Re:My choice -- Bad URL

[Jess]

OpenXLS seems to be an interesting product. Unfortunately the link is bad (unless you like Don Knotts, that is). Anyone know the correct link for OpenXLS?

SciGraphica?

[Jess]

Noticed SciGraphica on FreshMeat today. They're aiming for something similar to Microcal Origin. I've never use it, so I can't comment on it.

gnuplot, grace are the best choices IMHO

[Troy Baer]

gnuplot is insanely powerful and flexible, because it's scriptable and supports a ton of output formats. I don't know if it can do the shaded area between two curves bit, though. It also has some limited support for 3D plots, although if you're serious about 3D you should really look at IBM's OpenDX.

grace is also a good choice if you like GUI plotting tools, but I'm so used to gnuplot that grace seems awkward...

--Troy

Re:gnuplot, grace are the best choices IMHO

[amsel]

Gnuplot is indeed great, but the best I can get it to do re:shaded area is plot with impulses and set the line width large, or make the window small. The former can be quite remarkably ugly. I assume that on printing it would look even worse.

Found Something

[paulywog]

For those who are curious about what the question-asker-himself has found: the only package that I've found with the specific option to shade a region between two lines is jsplot. It takes input for it's XY plots in a four column format (X, Y, upper, lower) and then is able to plot X versus Y as a line, plus shade the region between upper and lower. Exactly what I was looking for! Unfortunately, the interface leaves something to be desired.

Thanks for all of the input... time to go add some functionality to gnu plot I think!

xmgr?

[a humble lich]

I'm not sure if it does shading very well but xmgr is a good free plotting package. I don't like the interface as much as matlab but it is free and can do some things matlab can't.