6. Graphics and Visualization
Gnuplot
Gnuplot is a command-line driven interactive function plotting
utility. It handles both curves (2 dimensions) and surfaces (3
dimensions). Surfaces can be floating in the 3-d coordinate space,
or as a contour plot. For 2-d plots, there are also many plot
styles, including lines, points, lines with points, error bars,
and impulses. Graphs may be labeled with arbitrary labels and
arrows, axes labels, a title, date and time, and a key. It has
multiple plotting capabilities too. It allows saving the graphs in
various formats which can be included in word processors.
It can be used to generate publication quality plots.
NCAR Graphics
A very popular graphics package which is very well documented and widely
used. It provides basic ingredients for creating complex plots as
functions / routines that can be called from Fortran and C. There is
a contributed programming interface to the NCAR Graphics package:
NCL (NCAR Command Language). The programming interfaces provide access
to complex graphics utilities like contouring, world map projections,
and velocity vectors. For the most part, the C interface is built on
top of the Fortran interface... It is distributed under the GNU public
license. Click here
for going to the documentation of all its various components.
OpenDX
A very good Open Source Data eXplorer. It can handle large amounts of data
and creates great visualizations. It was the tool I stumbled upon when
I wanted a free graphics routine to make 3-D plots and zoom-in, rotate,
and really eXplore the output Data from my codes. The downside is that
compiling from source is really challenging and getting started is a
difficult. However it has excellent documentation distributed with it
and once I started off it was the best tool I have ever used.
Gri:
It is a language for scientific graphics programming. The claim that Gri
is similar to LaTeX in the sense that both provide extensive power as a
reward for tolerating a learning curve seems exciting and I for one want
to check this out!! Check out the following
article
in The Linux Journal. Go to the gri home page if you are now impressed by
it and check out download info and manuals.
MayaVi:
A scientific data visualizer written in Python. It is distributed under the
BSD
license. The screenshots look promising. Check out the above link
for more details.
PGPLOT:
PGPLOT is a Fortran 77 or C callable subroutine package for drawing
scientific 2D and Simple 3D plots. One can call these routines during
runtime and redirect the output to a variety of devices at run time.
It is well documented and the full documentation is available at the
above site. It is Free for Non-Commercial Use. A user manual is available
online at PGPLOT
Users Manual
PLplot:
This is a library of scientific plotting functions that can be called from
C, C++, FORTRAN, TCL, PYTHON. PLplot features as described in the above link
are, "It can be used to create standard x-y plots, semilog plots,
log-log plots, contour plots, 3D plots, mesh plots, bar charts and pie charts.
Multiple graphs (of the same or different sizes) may be placed on a single
page with multiple lines in each graph. There are almost 2000 characters
in the extended character set. This includes four different fonts, the
Greek alphabet and a host of mathematical, musical, and other symbols.
A variety of output devices are supported and new devices can be easily
added by writing a small number of device dependent routines". To download
click
here .
Grace
Grace is a WYSIWYG 2D plotting tool for the X Window System and Motif.
Grace runs on practically any version of Unix. Grace is a descendant of
ACE/gr, also known as Xmgr. It is lisenced under the GNU public license.
This link also has a tutorial and download information.
SciGraphica
SciGraphica is a application for data analysis and technical graphics.
It fully supplies plotting features for 2D, 3D and polar charts. The
aim is to obtain a fully-featured, cross-platform, user-friendly,
self-growing scientific application. It is free and open-source,
released under the GPL license.
Plotutils:
The GNU plotutils package contains software for both programmers and
technical users. Its centerpiece is libplot.a powerful C/C++ function
library for exporting 2-D vector graphics in many file formats, both
vector and raster. It can also do vector graphics animations.
Besides libplot, the package contains command-line programs for
plotting scientific data. Many of them use libplot to export graphics.
DISLIN
DISLIN is a high-level plotting library for displaying data as curves,
polar plots, bar graphs, pie charts, 3D-color plots, surfaces, contours
and maps.
ImLib3D
ImLib3D is an open source C++ library for 3D (volumetric) image processing.
It contains most basic image processing algorithms, and some more
sophisticated ones. It comes with an optional viewer that features
multi-planar views, animations, vector field views and 3D (OpenGL)
multi-planar.
Ptplot:
Ptplot is a 2D data plotter and histogram tool implemented in Java.
Ptplot can be used as a standalone applet or application, or it can be
embedded in your own applet or application.
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