Time for some collective wisdom. What are some good, noncommercial (or at least not expensively commercial; matlab does a good job, but the price tag has 4 digits left of the decimal, 2 would be ok) plotting packages? One of the best I ever encountered was CricketGraph, but that was back in 1990 or so. They seem defunct and it's getting hard to run on modern computers. (Impossible with Mac OSX 10.5, doable in 10.4, but it came out in the era of OS 6). Mac or *nix platforms.
I'm not trying to do anything elaborate, just view some data, perhaps multiple x or y axes, logarithmic axes, put labels where I'd like (at a click, not by computing displacements, to name a flaw of GrADS). Data to come from plain text files. I suppose I can insert commas if the software insisted. I'd as soon be able to go to a few hundred thousand data points, and 10,000 or so is definitely required. If it turns out that 'grapher' (shipped with Macs) does the job, I'll register my embarrassment and ask how to make it read in a data file.
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Thoughts and notes on science from another blogging Grumbine.
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Please see the comment policy for details. And the link policy for details about that. The latter is more open than you might expect.
I expect it to be fun for all, however, as you really can get quite far in understanding the world, even climate, by understanding this sort of fundamental. If I get too much less fundamental, let me know where I went astray.
* Ok, I concede that not many middle school students will get everything. Even a fair number of adults will find some parts hard to follow. Still, some middle school kids will have fun. And almost everyone will follow a number of posts just fine.
Please see the comment policy for details. And the link policy for details about that. The latter is more open than you might expect.
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About Me
- Robert Grumbine
- In my day job I work on the oceanography, meteorology, climatology, glaciology end of my science interests, but I'm interested in everything, science or not. So I've also been on stage in a production of Comedy of Errors, run an ultramarathon, and been to Epidaurus, Greece, to see a production of Euripides' Iphigenia among the Taurians Prior to starting the current job, I was a post-doc in oceanography in the UCAR ocean modelling program, and earned my doctorate from the Department of the Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago (1989). My undergraduate degree involved Applied Math, Engineering, Astrophysics, and Glaciology. Of course I don't speak for my employer, whoever that may be.
9 comments:
gnuplot: free, and a CLI. Works for me.
I still used CricketGraph III, just keep buying old, used Macs with OS9 or 10 on them. I used them also for another program, Circadia, which has not been updated since 1992, and is essential for my type of data.
Did you get my e-mail re: this topic?
If you already know matlab, then
matplotlib:
gallery
screenshots
might not be a huge leap, see:
getting started
and
scipy for matlab
users
regards, Phil
I use GraphPad Prism.
Not free, but cheap, easy to use, and produces excellent quality graphics. I use it for most of my publications.
The other obvious one is R - it is more fiddly, but useful for certain types of plots and of course has the advantage of being within my programming/stats environment.
Another free one is Dataplot, from NIST. I don't know how up to date it is these days.
There's also NCL, the "NCAR Command Language" which makes beautiful graphics and is adequate for pretty serious analysis. They also have a python module called PyNGL that replicates NCL in python. Both are free and open source and work great on Macs.
An alternative to matlab is octave, essentially a free clone of matlab. I've had mixed results with it.
Wikipedia has a page on this.
You might also like to give MathGV a drive.
If you know Matlab, then give Scilab a try. Other links to Matlab clones can be found here
P. Lewis.
Try also new MagicPlot version. It's free for noncommercial.
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