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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.
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dist - frequency distribution histogram on a data field
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lines - line plots with optional data points and error bars, up to 4 groups
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pie - pie graphs
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stack - stacked bar graphs, up to 4 levels |

scat - scatterplots
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vbars - bar graph of 1 or 2 groups with error bars
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vbars - with error bars only
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Or, you can write custom ploticus scripts for maximum power and flexibility:
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.
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.
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 data display engine
Copyright Steve Grubb
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