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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."
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.