[johnMG]

I'm looking for a small OS X (or even Java I suppose) program to do simple
data plotting / graphing. I.e. To make pretty pictures from data:


^ y
| .
| .
| .
| .
| .
+-----------------> x

I write little programs myself that usually produc text files full of
numerical results, ex.:

1.2 3.4
2.33 8.9
4.3 10.3
5.0 12.92
6.1 14.8

And I need an easy way to plot them (preferably with labeled axes).
An easy way to then print them out would be gravy.

Thank you.

[johnMG]

Whoops. I meant my little ascii picture to look more like:

Code:
^  y
|                 .
|           .
|     .
|  .
| .
+-----------------> x

[plasticmoz]

I know this isn't small, but if you have Office you may want to use Excel.

[nadador]

You could check out gnuplot, a unix command line plotting utility that's available for OS X via Fink. It does simple plots quickly and has many output options (I like to output to png for use in word documents, powerpoint, etc.) I use it with data files made with FORTRAN programs mostly, similar to what you want to do.

Originally posted by johnMG:
I'm looking for a small OS X (or even Java I suppose) program to do simple
data plotting / graphing. I.e. To make pretty pictures from data:


^ y
| .
| .
| .
| .
| .
+-----------------> x

I write little programs myself that usually produc text files full of
numerical results, ex.:

1.2 3.4
2.33 8.9
4.3 10.3
5.0 12.92
6.1 14.8

And I need an easy way to plot them (preferably with labeled axes).
An easy way to then print them out would be gravy.

Thank you.

[johnMG]

plasticmoz wrote:
I know this isn't small, but if you have Office you may want to use Excel.

I don't have Office installed, but thanks. Though, I *do* have AppleWorks.

nadador, thanks for the tip about gnuplot. I don't currently have fink installed, but it sounds like I'm doing things similar to what you're doing, so I'll give fink + gnuplot a try.

Any others?

[johnMG]

plasticmoz wrote:
I know this isn't small, but if you have Office you may want to use Excel.

I don't have Office installed, but thanks. Though, I *do* have AppleWorks.

nadador, thanks for the tip about gnuplot. I don't currently have fink installed, but it sounds like I'm doing things similar to what you're doing, so I'll give fink + gnuplot a try.

Any others?

(P.S. -- Something seems to be amiss with the MacNN forum today. I'm having trouble posting/replying/editing previous posts.)

[johnMG]

epilogue:

Discovered a most excellent-looking plotting program called Grace.

Installed fink, installed grace ... crud. No go.

Code:
$ /sw/bin/grace
dyld: /sw/bin/grace can't open library: /sw/lib/libpdf.2.dylib
    (No such file or directory, errno = 2)
Trace/BPT trap

Then discovered ploticus.

Code:
sudo apt-get install ploticus2

And bingo. Nice plots of all kinds.

To get it to work, I first run Apple's X11. Then, from the little xterm window, I need to source my .bash_profile. To create a plot with a data file ./foo.txt, from the xterm, run:

Code:
ploticus -prefab scat data=foo.txt x=1 y=2

Sweet.

[mitchell_pgh]

I just found out Keynote doesn't have the plot ability.

Strange

[JKT]

If you don't want to mess about with X11 you could just use AppleWorks, but a better alternative is the Calc application in NeoOffice/J (a version of OpenOffice.org that runs natively in OS X - freeware, btw).

[VEGAN]

Originally posted by johnMG:
plasticmoz wrote:
I know this isn't small, but if you have Office you may want to use Excel.

I don't have Office installed, but thanks. Though, I *do* have AppleWorks.

nadador, thanks for the tip about gnuplot. I don't currently have fink installed, but it sounds like I'm doing things similar to what you're doing, so I'll give fink + gnuplot a try.

Any others?

How about OpenOffice.org?

[johnMG]

> How about OpenOffice.org?

I think that's a rather large piece of software to install just to get graphing ability. Really though, ploticus seems like just what I was looking for. It's GNU GPL'd, it's easy to use (since it's got that "prefab" mechanism), and it's a nice and small program.

It's too bad I couldn't get Grace working, but I don't really need it's advanced mathematical analysis features right now anyway.

I didn't try gnuplot, as it doesn't seem to be GPL'd (which is always my first preference).

[johnMG]

Woo hoo! Just got Grace working. I had to

Code:
sudo apt-get install pdflib

[MartiNZ]

Another easy option would be R from http://cran.r-project.org - assuming you're running Jaguar or Panther, the latest version is quite nice. This would of course require you to learn a bit of code, but there was a discussion about it with some examples a few months back on this forum.