ploticus: gallery of data displays

## Gallery of data displays | Welcome Gallery Handbook |
| Manual page for Gallery_of_data_displays(PL)

Welcome to the ploticus gallery! Located here are dozens of graphical data displays produced using ploticus data display software. It is a mixture of simplistic and involved examples, intended both as an introduction/tutorial for getting started, and as a reference/test suite. Unless otherwise stated, all data are fictional.

You can download examples individually and try them. You can download the entire collection of examples by visiting the download page and downloading the "complete node". You can view all of the examples at once as miniturized PNG thumbnails or GIF thumbnails; there is also an alphabetical index of all ploticus examples.

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Real-world examples

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Clinical trials examples

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Scaling and Axes The preliminaries to plotting data.

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Line Plots Lineplots are used to show values that change from left to right. Often the change is over time along the X (horizontal) axis. Use proc lineplot.

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Filled Line Plots A line plot variant is to fill the area under the curve, in order to highlight a particular region, to show a difference between curves, or for stylistic reasons. Use proc lineplot with the fill option.

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Range Sweeps Range sweeps may be used to depict ranges that change from left to right. Often the change is over time along the X (horizontal) axis. Use proc rangesweep.

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Pie Graphs Pie graphs may be used to depict proportions that make up a whole, such as budget categories, or survey breakdowns. Use proc pie.

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Bar Graphs (vertical) Bar graphs (histograms) may be used to show comparisons, distributions, or category tabulations. They are also sometimes used to show values that change over time. Use proc bars.

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Bar Graphs (horizontal) Horizontal bars are useful for compactness or where time values are being compared. Use proc bars with the horizontalbars option.

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Time Lines Timelines are used to display events and durations with respect to time. The result may be in the form of a timetable, project progress chart, etc. Use proc bars with the horizontalbars and segmentfields attributes.

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Bar Proportions Bars may be used to show proportions. (A pie graph might also be used). Use proc bars with the stackfields option.

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Scatter Plots (2-D) Scatter plots display data points in one or two dimensions. Every data point is plotted with a mark, symbol, or label. 2-D scatterplots are often used to show correlation (or lack thereof) between two variables. Use proc scatterplot.

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Scatter Plots (1-D) 1-D scatterplots show the distribution of one variable. Lines, symbols, characters or text may be used to mark points. Use proc scatterplot.

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Range Bars (box plots) Range bars (box plots) compactly show the distribution and range of a set of values. The median (50th percentile) is shown by a dot, the box covers the interquartile range (25th through 75th percentiles), and the tails show the minima/maxima or the 5th and 95th percentiles. Use proc rangebar which can compute the medians, quartiles, etc. as well as render the bars.

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Error Bars Error bars show the amount of margin of error for a value. This usually is +/- the standard deviation. If the amount of error has been calculated in advance, use proc bars. If you want ploticus to compute the mean and standard deviation, use proc rangebar with the meanmode option.

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Curve Fitting Curve fitting may be useful to illustrate trends in noisy data, or to show where data points lie with respect to average. proc curvefit can generate moving average and bspline curves.

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Legends When different symbols, colored bars, colored lines, etc. are used for comparison, a legend is usually necessary to describe what the various colors or symbols mean or what they correspond to. While not the most "sexy" element of a plot, it is often absolutely necessary. Use the legendlabel attribute of each plotting proc, then use proc legend to render the legend.

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Annotation Annotation may be used to denote specific points or regions on a plot that have some importance, or for any text placement. Use proc annotate.

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Table Rendering

Ploticus includes pltab, which can take ascii tables and lists and render them as is in a nice font without the use of formatting codes. Various embellishments may also be done.

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Table-based Graphs

The pltab program may also be used to create graphs that are linked to tables and lists, perhaps overflowing onto multiple pages.
data display engine
Copyright Steve Grubb

Markup created by unroff 1.0, `` `` July 11, 2001.