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Unix Graphing Programs?

Posted by Cliff on from the pretty-informational-pictures dept.

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."

6 of 85 comments (clear)

  1. gnuplot by Croatian+Sensation · · Score: 5, Informative

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

    www.gnuplot.info

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  2. gnuplot of course! by JFitzsimmons · · Score: 5, Informative

    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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  3. GRACE by trip11 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  4. R for Statistics, Ploticus for same and More by Monster+Zero · · Score: 5, Informative
    For all of my statistical analysis work, I use 'R', which is a pretty complete package for my uses. I use ploticus for all of my plots, and have been very happy with it, just be sure to read the docs before you get frustrated, as it takes a bit of reading to piece together a good plot. Ploticus has rudimentary statistics operators through an input filter mechanism (mean, std dev, min/max, etc) but for serious work R is where it is at.

    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/

  5. What I've used by asahetter · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  6. Several good ones out there by crmartin · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.