ploticus: welcome
Description: ploticus data display software by Steve Grubb
Keywords: ploticus, plotting, charting, graphics, bar, boxplot, scatterplot, regression, correlation, pie, histogram

Mirror site (Europe) Other free software tools (SGPR home)

## Welcome | Gallery Handbook SGPR Home |
| Manual page for Welcome(PL)

What's new - Version 2.00 released on 20 Sep '01. Download
Many types of data displays can now be created quickly from the command line using these prefabs:

chron - chronological data (dates, times, etc); tabulate by week, month, etc. | dist - frequency distribution histogram on a data field | lines - line plots with optional data points and error bars, up to 4 groups | pie - pie graphs
| stack - stacked bar graphs, up to 4 levels | scat - scatterplots | vbars - bar graph of 1 or 2 groups with error bars | vbars - with error bars only

Or, you can write custom ploticus scripts for maximum power and flexibility:

| Index of script examples PNG thumbnails of script examples GIF thumbnails

is free software that generates plots and graphs from data. The primary component is the pl program. Create basic plots quickly from the command line using ploticus prefabs, or write customized scripts for maximum power and flexibility. You can invoke it manually, or automatically from other programs, or even as a CGI program. Produce image graphics (PNG, GIF, JPEG) for web pages and slide presentations. PostScript and EPS is supported for paper reports and posters; graphs can also be viewed interactively on X11 displays. Accepts tabular ascii data input. Numerics, alphanumeric categories, dates and times (in a variety of notations) can be plotted directly. You can also compute frequency distributions, correlation coefficients, curves, regression lines, medians, quartiles, etc. Developed on Solaris / unix, it is available for a number of platforms.

- Handbook, the complete user's guide for Ploticus.
- Gallery of examples organized by type, with brief tutorial.
- What's new
- Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
- Sampler of web sites using ploticus
- User Feedback Page
- Download
- Correspondence and how to report problems & bugs
- Central Europe mirror site (Austria)
- Ploticus news group at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ploticus . Anyone can post or read messages via the Yahoo groups web site. There's no need to join the group unless you want to receive all messages by email.
- 2001 ploticus T shirt

Getting started: The easiest way to get started is to use one of the available prefabs, and just supply certain key parameters on the command line. For example, suppose you want a pie graph, and you have a tab-delimited data file called `mydata` with labels in field 1 and values in field 2. You could generate the pie graph in PNG format by issuing this command, which uses the pie prefab:
`pl -prefab pie -png data=mydata delim=tab labels=1 values=2`
The PNG result would be in the file `pie.png`.
If you eventually need more customized graphs, you can code your own scripts. One way to proceed is to look at the gallery of example scripts, find one that is similar to what you want, download it, and modify it to suit. For example, suppose you have downloaded and modified a script called `bars4.htm`; you could generate your result in EPS format using this command:
pl bars4.htm -eps
The EPS result would be in the file `bars4.eps`.
The author and maintainer is Stephen C. Grubb. I now have some other free software tools available, too.
data display engine
Copyright Steve Grubb

Markup created by unroff 1.0, `` `` September 14, 2001.