WHAT IT IS
xpplot is a quick and handy tool to plot Your data
in X-Windows under UNIX.
It was inspired by XGraph by David Harrison,
some useful interactive features were added (see below).
It is written in simple C using only Xlib library (and libm.a).
INPUT DATA FORMAT
text files
values separated by blanks (space,new-line,tab)
ARGUMENTS
It takes one or two arguments - the names of files with Your data.
When called
- with one argument,
xpplot plots each value along y axes against its number.
- with two arguments,
xpplot plots Yn versus Xn, taking Xn from the first file and
Yn from the second file.
- otherwise
it prints a little help
try xpplot -h for more help
(You can use a little script
to separate columns from a multi-column data file :
awk '{print $2}' to extract the 2nd column for example
or You can use the command paste to combine them back together.)
FEATURES
You can
- see a detail by zoom using mouse
- unzoom
- get back the original settings
- make the picture sleep for large reconfiguration
and make it wake up then back again
- make a Hardcopy to a PostScript file
( which can be inserted to a TeX document e.g.
by PSBOX by Jean Orloff)
- change the way individual points are connected
( this was the first feature I missed in XGraph)
- change the index of the first and the last point to be plotted
( to see just a definite part of a complicated picture)
- make the attractor reconstruction using the Taken's theorem
(when called with one argument - which assumes that Your data
is a time series sampled in equidistant time intervals)
- read the coordinates of the point pointed to by the mouse
by clicking the mouse button
(without moving the mouse which would make a zoom)
- see a growing file on-line in real time
(this can be useful
when the computation of your results is time demanding
or to see measured data on-line)
HOW TO MAKE DISCONNECTED LINES
value -0.3737 in Your data has special meaning :
it is not plotted and it is not connected with the previous
and with the next point
(when calling xpplot with two datafiles, use the breaker -0.3737 in both files)
values -0.373710 ... -0.373715 in Your data
also change the way how the points are connected
in the same style as clicking a mouse button in the line window (try it)
(see demo files x and y and try xpplot x y )
OPTIONS
-h help
-b batch run to make a Hardcopy file without X-Window spectacle
-t "Title of the picture" to specify the title (useful with -b)
-ln where n is an integer between 0 and 5
set the way individual points are connected (useful with -b)
-f "HardCopyFile" to specify the name of the output file for hardcopy
default is hcopy0.ps
if this already exists hcopy1.ps will be used (and so on)
-pn where n is a number (it can be decimal)
to see Your new data once in n seconds
0 turns this mode off, which is default
-F FontName to specify Your favorite Font
(only for the interactive buttons)
-g WIDTHxHEIGHT+Xoffset+Yoffset to specify the geometry
of the main window
(useful in a script which calls xpplot more than once
to make more xpplot windows on Your screen)
HOW TO COMPILE
if you have the file xpplot.tar.Z type
$ uncompress xpplot.tar.Z
$ tar xf xpplot.tar
$ cc -o xpplot xpplot.c -lm -lX11
BIRTHPLACE
The first inspiration began
at the Brussels Free University
at the department of Physical Chemistry.
The main work has been done
at the Prague Institute of Chemical Engineering
at the Department of Chemical Engineering.
Author :
Pavel POKORNY
Department of Chemical Engineering and
Department of Mathematics
Prague Institute of Chemical Technology
Technicka 5
CS 166 28 PRAGUE
Czech Republic
e-mail : pokornp@vscht.cz
phone : +42 2 332 3173
or +42 2 332 3103
fax : +42 2 311 7335
or +42 2 311 3629
Good luck, comments welcome.....
