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Unix Graphing Programs?
An anonymous reader asks: "For university I am looking for a program to make some nice 2D or 3D graphs to represent some data for statistics. I am currently using RedHat Fedora as my Linux distro but KChart, Gnumeric, OpenOffice, and the other ones I found weren't suitable. It would be nice if the "template" was easily configurable so I could standarize all of my work. i.e. have the actual value next to the bar etc.. It's mainly bar graphs that I need. Does anyone have any recommendations for good easy Linux programs to graph general data? professor didn't have any ideas for Linux."
If you want to make consistent looking graphs, with minimal effort, use GNUPLOT. Great piece of software.
www.gnuplot.info
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I use gnuplot for most things.. it takes a day or two to get used to it though so if you're out of time, try something else since it's not the best documented of projects. (generally i produce data graphs for physics lab reports)
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.
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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.
http://search.cpan.org/~kester/Chart-Scientific-0
Friend of mine wrote it a while ago to do 2-D scientific plotting. If you know some PERL, you might be able to get this to fill your needs.
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Now don't quote me on this but i'm pretty sure gnu octave uses gnuplot as its engine.
It's syntax is fairly similar to several large expensive math packages and it's fairly easy once you get the hang of it (just like everything in life).
As several others mentioned gnuplot is a great program. If you would like a bit more GUI with your plotting I would recomend Grace (formally xmgrace). Its Free too. Website: http://plasma-gate.weizmann.ac.il/Grace/ It only does 2D plots but handles them very nicely, can do fitting, read tables of text file data, and is very customizable as far as lables go. I use it to plot out most of my data by pulling it straight from the output through an awk script to format the data slightly and then open Grace. Give it a shot. Good luck with 3D plots, but I might recomend maple. Again with a bit of an awk script you can format the data into a form maple can read and plot out.
Over here.
Does bar charts.
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I usually input all of my data into PostgeSQL, use R to do an analysis and insert the new data into the DB, then use ploticus to pull directly from the DB and create PNG format plots. Couldn't be easier once setup, makes writing conference papers and whitepapers (relatively) easy. If you are regenerating the same style of plot lots of times, ploticus is well worth the effort of setting up the first time.
http://www.r-project.org/
http://ploticus.sourceforge.net/
I had the same problem as you last year. I tried gnuplot, which is good if you need to do some quick plots but are generally looked on as excel quality. I recommend XMGrace for 2-dimentional stuff. (I've published papers using this). And Mayavi for 3-D. Makes some nice purdy pictures.
GNU plot, as several people have suggested.
If your doing stats stuff, seriously look into R.
ePix looks good, although I haven't tried it.
asymptote is very powerful, although you probably want to do some tool hacking or scripting to make use of it.
Probably the ultimate tool for such things is Mathematica. Costs money, but the student version is feasible and it's a lovely for all this sort of thing.
And, of course, you could try searching freshmeat --- there are many many other tools there.
It's a very powerful set of php libraries which make it very easy to get graphs exactly how you want them, http://www.aditus.nu/jpgraph/. I've used it in a number of situations and found it extremely fast and easy to use with really professional results.
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The open-source statistics package R makes all kinds of graphs, has all kinds of great extensions for sophisticated statistical manipulations, has a following among professional statisticians, and is in active development. It is also pretty fast for large datasets, too. The language is a bit of a pain to use at first, though.
Pirates like it, too.
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It is also free (gpl), and comes with example files for creating a variety of different graphs.
If you don't mind dropping $99, ChartDirector is pretty good. Good documentation, lots of features, good support, responsive to bug reports. It runs on Windows, Linux and FreeBSD.
If you just want an extremely basic program to make 2-dimenstion bar, line, or scatter graphs, xgraph is about as bare-bones simple as they come.
It runs on any Unix and dumps PostScript output files. Sometimes anything more is overkill.
Most responses are gnuplot, which is pretty good although a bit crude.
I personally use Kpl (http://frsl06.physik.uni-freiburg.de/privat/still e/kpl/), but I feel QtiPlot (http://soft.proindependent.com/qtiplot.html) has a lot of potential.
Hope that helps.
If you are facile with Java, or your data is already in a javax.swing.table.TableModel, then I suggest JFreeChart.
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http://root.cern.ch/
Not quite the simplest program, but it can do what you want, is for free and available for a lot of platforms.
T
www.r-project.org
For my PhD thesis I had to produce a lot of bargraphs etc. recently, and found R combined with some perl scripts a wonderful tool.
- Hubert
DANSE has a great review of a lot of different options. Most are cross-platform and scriptable and many are open source. They are interested in building python-based tools for neutron scattering experiments, so there is that bias to the wiki. But they have good screenshots & good pros/cons that many other projects can relate to.
As others have suggested, Grace is fantastic for 2D. Hippodraw is the most under-rated/unheard of that is also quite amazing. I use them both. I also use Matplotlib with my python work.
If you do LaTeX & script your plots, Gri is a good bet.
I have sometimes used gnuplot & Scigraphica, but they are less useful to me. A lot of other people still use gnuplot, so it is always good to have in the toolkit. It also has decent 3D that is not present in my preferred 2D programs. But it is uglier and clumsier than alternatives. Scigraphica wants to be Microcal Origin, but it isn't there yet. It also dropped out of development for quite a while.
I like open source. But if you are agnostic (and have deep pockets), I always thought tecplot looked cool.
Try GMT (Generic Mapping Tools) at http://gmt.soest.hawaii.edu/
Widely used by people in the geophysics field. It's open source, and for the basic linux user it can be a slightly fiddly to get up and running.
It's a collection of command line tools that generate postscript output. You can basically customise everything to your exact tastes, and re-use the scripts if you want consistent graphs and charts.
OK, I vote with a lot of other people on Grace/xmgrace for 2d plotting.
For higher dimensionality visualization, though, nobody has mentioned openDX (www.opendx.org). What other plotting and visualization program can easily plot 6-dimensional data (for example, a rank-3 tensor field) on a 3d space?
OpenDX takes a little while to really understand, but once you get it, the payoff is trmendous. It has a very general data model that allow one to have arbitrary topology connecting your values, from completely scattered points with no explicit relation, to various meshes such as simplices (triangles/tets), cubic/hypercubic lattices, and many more.
Also, it represents data in files very flexibly, so one can put structural information in a small, simple file, and reference a larger (potentially huge), external file for the actual data.