## User comments and feedback

Welcome Gallery Handbook

Manual page for User_comments_and_feedback(PL)

This page is a summary of comments and feedback, good and bad, from users of ploticus. Usually questions, bug reports, and feature requests are edited out, since these are summarized in the FAQ or the What's New page. I may also edit feedback for brevity.
To post to this page, send email to steve@sgpr.net. It may take some time before I have a chance to summarize mail and get it on this page. I have taken the liberty of including names and email addresses, if this is not suitable for you please let me know.
This page is for comments posted before Jan 1 '01.
26 Nov 2000
Hi,
Your program is super!!! Using it on Win2k Professional. You can see our graph at: gunnadb.home.att.net
Stan Gunn
W2k Tips and Tricks
ADB Tips and Tricks

18 Nov 2000
We're calculating the summary stats in MySQL which is a lot quicker than passing the unit record data to ploticus when there is a lot of it, which is why the ability to use values is important to us. apart from this, smooth sailing so far with ploticus - very nice indeed and much easier to control programmatically than Grace, which we also use. Am beginning to think about an object-oriented Python wrapper for ploticus - do you know of any similar work in this direction? One advantage Grace has is the ability to read input from a named pipe, as well as write to stdout, which means it can sit in memory waiting for commands.
[Even so], keeping ploticus in memory as a long-running process is not really an issue given the small size of the binary. Better to concentrate on new graphical features and speed optimisation when called as a one-shot process, and just give up and die in the face of an error. On our new linux server the binary is clearly cached permanently in memory so the start-up latency is really small anyway, particularly compared to how long it takes to pull the necessary data out of MySQL.
Cheers,
Tim Churches tchur@bigpond.com
Sydney, Australia

15 Nov 2000
Hi Steve
Ploticus is really cool! ;) Thanks
Henrique C. M. Andrade hcma@cs.umd.edu

10 Nov 2000
Hello Steve,
I downloaded and compiled version 1.39 today when I noticed the looping example. This seems very nice! Do you expect to add the autorange of Y values from a variable number of series any time soon? With this, the plot file would be independent (somewhat) of the data file, and that would be nice.
Another related item I would like to see is specification of Legend labels, Title, etc, all coming from the data file (or perhaps comments in the data file that have directives in them, or an auxiliary data file). This way I could write a "generic" plot file (without resorting to plot file templates), and pump many sent of data into it w/o touching each up for these details.
I look foward to seeing what you do for the next release. Overall, I can make it do what I need, but it takes a little work to create many similar graphs from scripts. Thanks again for such a nice plotting tool!
Michael D. Beynon beynon@cs.umd.edu

1 Nov 2000
Hi Steve!
We are evaluating your excellent software for possible use in our admittedly all JAVA environment. I've been using the software all of last week and find more and more powerful as I use it, however, I ran into a problem on Friday that I cannot seem to resolve. On Friday afternoon it simply stopped plotting. Yesterday I was able to investigate why and saw that the /var/tmp directory that it was using was filled up and there was no more room on the slice. I cleaned up the directory and even bounced the Apache server, but I still cannot see the plots.
[This turned out to be a local sysadmin problem]
Rudy Gireyev rgireyev@styleclick.com

31 Oct 2000
Hi,
I wish to thank you for producing an excellent program which makes generating graphs an extremely easy task..
Graham Smith gqs@zip.com.au

30 Oct 2000
Ploticus is lovely! I just showed it to a friend whose father (coincidentally) was looking for something to produce charts of patient data for his practice (being a doctor). The examples are so relevant! :-)
Al B. Snell alaric@alaric-snell.com

26 Oct 2000
Hello Steve
I found your ploticus software on the net and I'm very interested to test and use it. Now I have the following questions:
- Can you use different fonts in the same graph (PS or EPS-output)?
- Do you plan to use cmyk-colordefinitions for PS- and EPS-output?
  Mattias Dillier Matthias.Dillier@snb.ch

  25 Oct 2000
  hello.
  I'm a happy user of Ploticus, which I use on Linux to make mainly time evolution graphs: software size/time, anomaly numbers/time, ...
  I call ploticus from Python, as an external command. I tried many other packages on Python, intended to make graphs, but Ploticus is the one with the best date support I know of.
  Pierre Hanser Pierre.Hanser@sxb.bsf.alcatel.fr

  27 Sep 2000
  Hey Steve:
  We are testing out your awesome ploticus program. We compiled the source code on a Linux Redhat 6.2 box and it is running very well. It is a very versatile crisp clear image builder which displays our live data very efficiently.
  Roger McGetchie
  Roger.McGetchie@ec.gc.ca

  19 Sep 2000
  Thank you very much. This is working! I think you wrote one good graphing application! Thanks
  Pawel Szczodruch
  pszczo1@uic.edu

  22 Aug 2000
  Thanks for a great product, I think this is what I was looking for to replace the GNU plotting utilities (the output didn't look right).
  Alberto Alonso
  a_alonso@netzero.net

  14 Aug 2000
  Steve,
  Thanks for the info. I was unsure what symbol to use to call the declared variable. That worked like a charm. Keep up the good work. I am really pleased how flexible and handy that Ploticus is to use. Have a great day.
  Richard Canada
  richard.canada@mrl-crl.com

  04 Aug 2000
  We ahve been very pleased with ploticus. We have converted half of our graphs (from motif/kl widgets) in 3 days. Thanks for the use of the program. When we are finished porting our graphs and we have something online, i'll send you a link.
  Also, have you considered setting up a mailling list for ploticus? i would setup one for you, but i'm not sure my home dsl connection could handle it. Perhaps when my company gets our server up we could host it. i'll ask. If there is anyone who is working on that, please let me know. It would be useful if we could all contribute to supporting this program. And i am sure that you get tired of answering the same questions over and over again.
  darcy w. christ
  darcy@elegant.com

  3 Aug 2000
  Steve,
  I am evaluating ploticus for presenting data internal to our organization. It is a likely choice given the beautiful job you have done with it, easof use, portability, and variety of output types.
  However, I am having difficulty with a minor point which I have not been able to answer for myself when reading the documentation.
  I want to make a line plot with grid lines at major and minor ticks while only labeling the major ticks.
  How do I get the grid lines on the minor ticks?
  Marc Schwarzschild
  ms@millburncorp.com

  1 Aug 2000
  Hi Steve,
  We are evaluating ploticus to use with our software InSPEC www.elegant.com. So far everything looks quite promising. One quick question for you. There seems to be a discrepancy between the way that the label text is formated in the x11 version and the png version. In the x11 version, the letters in the labels are right side up, whereas the letters in the pngs are on their side, running up. Is there a way to change this? Why does this happen?
  Darcy W. Christ
  <darcy@elegant.com>

  30 Jul 2000
  Hi
  First of all: well done ! in my opinion ploticus is a great tool. Secondly, I have a question: Is there a way to determine the width of a bar (each bar) within the data file instead of using an explicit command: 'barwidth n' ?
  If this feature does not exist:
  -It seems to me this is a very important feature for figures that draw many bars (hundreds or thousands).
  -I don't understand why the user may control the length of the bar (through a data-file) but not its width.
  Thanks,
  Tsafrir Dan
  dants@cs.huji.ac.il

  19 Jul 2000
  Steve, I just came across ploticus and it looks great! I thought I'd let you know that the URL for the PNG home page, which is referred to on the page "Making web based graphs" (web.html) has changed to http://www.libpng.org/pub/png effective May 3, 2000.
  David King
  drk@elegant.com

  14 Jul 2000
  Hi Steve,
  Ploticus is great. I have hacked up preliminary svg support for ploticus. I'll pass it along in a couple of days when it's in a little better shape.
  -Doug
  dorr@mail.ffnet.com

  13 Jul 2000
  Dear Steve Grubb,
  I downloaded ploticus some time ago and will certainly use it to produce on-the-fly evaluation pictures for a specialized web system, as well as for scientific data representation in publications.
  I regard the underlying idea as really ingenious and the resulting pictures as brilliant!
  Nevertheless, let me pose some bits of constructive critisism :-)
  # The executable name "pl" might conflict with the usual invocation of prolog (which at least I use on my system), with prolog presumably being around somewhat longer. I'd propose to change the standard name to something like ploti or even ploticus, which isn't soooo long as to detain someone from using it.
  # I am not able to use the -stdin feature to create my desired on-the-fly graphics. ...
  Yours sincerely,
  P. Roosen
  roosen@vollmer-roosen.de

  11 Jul 2000
  Hi Steve,
  I have a question regarding the new proc datesetting. If omitweekends is yes, does this mean that weekend data is added to Monday's data ? I'm not sure how to interpret this sentence in the documentation:
  Any Saturday or Sunday dates will be silently adjusted to the nearest weekday.
  If so, will it be possible to enhance Ploticus so that also the data is skipped ? This is very helpful in analysing CPU Performance Data. An obsolete product did exactly this: if "Ignore Weekends" has been activated all data of Sat and Sun are completely thrown away and were not shown in the graph.
  If not, then ignore this (but probably clearify for non-native speakers like me ;-)
  P.S. The article on Ploticus/iX will be published in Aug or Sep if HP3000 Newswire editor agrees.
  Best regards, Andreas
  aschmid4@csc.com

  10 Jul 2000
  I'm just dropping you a note to let you know that I've installed Ploticus and am using it to generate weather summaries for my personal web site.
  Here is the URL: http://bubo.hmsc.orst.edu/~edstrom/wthr.shtml
  It works well. Its pretty fast, versatile and produces clean, crisp images that survive GIFification reasonably well.
  Please keep me informed of updates to the package.
  John Edstrom edstrom@Poopsie.hmsc.orst.edu

  6 Jul 2000
  Steve
  It is done. Those .eps and .ps I need to prepare are for being used in LaTex docs. So, I have asked for help to some spanish users of latex. Jose Luis Diaz suggested the following [I will not make a plain translation. If you do not understand the following, then you could see the original text [in spanish, attached] and look for a translator -human preferently :-)
  The problem is that the fonts [ps] do not have the characters in the same position than the standart ISO-Latin 1. Then, the solution is to recodify the fonts for the resulting output.ps. For a file named tabla.ps, in a linux box do the following:

      $ head -n 6 tabla.ps > aux.ps
      $ cat reencode.enc >> aux.ps
      $ tail -n +7 tabla.ps >> aux.ps
      $ mv aux.ps tabla.ps

  These inserts the code reencode.enc [see the attachment] after the line %%EndComments in the file tabla.ps generated with ploticus.
  If everything goes right you should see the right character there.
  That's it.
  PS The attached .ps has an invented word. IMPORTANT: I have no idea if the recoding will affect any of the other characters.
  Emilio emilio@noanet.com.ar

  2 Jul 2000
  Steve
  I like your pl and pltab programs. They are nice, fast and relatively easy to use. Yet I have not decided to use them because I will need to have annotations made in Spanish in the resulting pics. I have skimmed through the documentation, so maybe I am bothering you for something I did not check properly. If so, then sorry. So, here are some questions:
  - How could I use accented characters in Title? For instance: Title: Población de Mamíferos de Tucumán.
  - And remember the ñ too.
  - What about underlining words in titles?
  I could make the annotations with some other packages [I use linux OS, so plenty of good options to do so]. But then, the 'automated and unattended way' philosophy will be gone. I have skimmed though the documentation, so maybe I am bothering for something I did not check properly. If so, then sorry.
  PS: I am learning from the examples you have included in the doc. Very good docs!
  Emilio Flores emilio@noanet.com.ar

  26 Jun 2000
  Hello,
  I'm using ploticus to draw some graph (not common isn't it ;-)) in perl script. i want to write a perl module for this usage, but before start this i would ask you if you know a project like this ?
  I will use ploticus to draw some collected value from my system agents hiways (http://hiways.org/ . no english translation for now. sorry).
  you're doing a good job. don't stop.
  bye
  PS : I'm french and my english is very bad. i hope you will understand me.
  BERGAMO Jean-Louis jlb@ecila.fr

  18 Jun 2000
  Hi Steve,
  I've downloaded ploticus, and VERY quickly was able to be highly productive with your beautiful package.
  I am using your package to create stock graphs, from stock data, just as you have shown in the example. It takes maybe 2 seconds to produce the graph, where on yahoo's site, whatever they are doing, it is instantaneous (I am using a cable modem). Is there anyway I can increase the performance of your package? *Any* thoughts on performance enhancement for web delivered dynamically generated graphics would be great!!
  Also, do you think that with the advent of XML a lot of this gif/png creation will not have to be done at all on the server side(for dynamic web page delivery of these types of graphics), ... and instead, the vector drawing will be simply done by the client? (at this time, the only vendor that supports this type of thing is, (I think) microsoft which has something called VML (http://www.microsoft.com/mind/0100/VML/VML.asp ), but I love linux and just can't get myself to go back to using or developing on windows....)
  In any case, Thanks for a fantastic software tool !!!!!!!
  Dave Linenberg dlinenbe@home.com

  15 Jun 2000
  Hi. I've only been using ploticus for about a day. So far I like it a lot.
  I do have a problem and I haven't seen it mentioned in the release notes. I'm running linux 2.2.16, adapted from RedHat 6.2. The compiler and libraries are pretty up-to-date. Its a dual processor workstation, if that is relevant.
  The problem is this: I want to make some graphs from data (temperature, atmospheric pressure, wind strength, and humidity) from a weather station periodically through the day. Each graph is separate and independent of the others, i.e. its not a composite graph. I use a perl scipt to get the data from the data base and generate a command/data text stream that is sent to pl via stdin. I have a loop that cycles throught the several data types drawing graphs .. and then a loop to print the data into the pipe.
  I've verified that it all works OK; I get what I expect when I run the perl script from the command line. However, when I run the script from a cron job, the first graph is OK, but the following graphs have the data from the first graph superimposed on it, as if they are both being plotted together as a single data set. It takes all of the labels, scaling factors, symbol colors and other attributes from the most recent, i.e. 'correct' data set, but plots the first and Nth data sets. I'm using simple scatterplots.
  I'm baffled. Like I say, it works just fine from the command line (I use tcsh usually) but the script is called from within a shell (bash) script file.
  The script, run frrom the command line or crond, both produce nice, well behaved files in /usr/tmp with unique names derived from their respective pids and they disappear between data-type loops in the main perl script. I don't have a clue where the initial data set is being fossilized.
  I have noticed that if I slow down the execution of the script (it normally only takes a few seconds to rip through the 5 graphs), the error becomes intermittent. I'm wondering if doesn't have something to do with the pl prgram 'sticking' in memory during a cron job, or something weird like that.
  Do you have any ideas about what is wrong here? Or, what routines might have be fooled by tained memory on startup? Any tips would be greatly appreciated.
  John Edstrom edstrom@bubo.hmsc.orst.edu

  27 Jun 2000
  Mr. Grubb,
  I have recently been using your excellent Ploticus on an HP 3000 minicomputer running MPE/iX. A Mr. Andreas Schmidt ported Ploticus to MPE (see http://www.hillschmidt.de/ploticus/). I only have one question: How do I continue one line to another in my source file? I need to specify several fieldnames in #proc getdata, but I want to use multiple lines to do so.
  Any hints would be greatly appreciated.
  Benji York benji_york@cal-na.com

  27 Jun 2000
  Just wanted to send you a quick note of thanks for Ploticus. It's an awesome graphing program. I've been using gnuplot for many years, and was always somewhat annoyed by the lack of support for a few specific things i wanted to do. Finally, after several fruitless quests for a Better Plotting Program, i found Ploticus (thanks to Google.com!) and all is well.
  In case you are interested, here's my "big" project with Ploticus:
  http://www.ewranglers.com/ThermLogs/temp.html
  See ya,
  Johan van Zanten johan@ewranglers.com

  26 Jun 2000
  Per you website correspondence clause,
  I'm using ploticus to monitor system resource usage among some machines. Basically, memory usage vs time.
  A more interesting use, I recently put ploticus too, was plotting a 24 acre property parcel map boundary from government data (marker, plus bearings and distance), and then adding in landmarks (roads, waterways, ..) via data from a GPS.
  Brian Litzinger brian@litzinger.com

  25 Jun 2000
  Dear Steve:
  I hit your website when I surf around. Your ploticus is great, so is your website. It is even more wonderful that you ditribute to Linux community for free.
  Solute to you!
  Xiaoqiang Su x-su@uchicago.edu

  23 Jun 2000
  I downloaded Ploticus 1.38 source yesterday. With one change (noted below), it compiled and ran flawlessly. Within about 30 minutes, I had produced most of the kinds of graphs that I need. Ploticus is excellent!
  The one change concerns preliminaries.c. On my Debian GNU/Linux systems, there is no /usr/tmp. Rather, /tmp is used because this is regularly cleaned out. Changing the first line of preliminaries.c worked for me. It might be useful to have this added to the Makefile: when users select their system, it also selects whether to use /usr/tmp or /tmp.
  Thanks for writing it and making it (and the source) available.
  Ian Neath neath@psych.purdue.edu

  1 Jun 2000
  Hi Steve,
  Just thought I'd let you know that ploticus compiles without problems with DJGPP. Unlike the cygwin version, there is no issue with additional libraries (i.e., cygwin1.dll). If you wish I can send the binaries.
  The only change required was altering the tmp directory to c:/tmp.
  Ken N. Seergobin ken@psych.utoronto.ca

  30 May 2000
  Hello -
  I've recently installed Ploticus, and I'm enjoying it very much. I have a question, however, about the location chosen for the temporary file.
  I see in preliminaries.c that /usr/tmp is used. I'm not sure, but I don't think this adheres to the Unix (Linux?) Filesystem Hierarchy Standard. Do you know if this is the case?
  I changed it on my system to use the /tmp directory.
  - Jeff Mitchell jbmitchell@SoftHome.net

  09 May '00
  Hi Steve,
  Don't want to take too much time out of your busy schedule. Just wanted to let you know that we are using your Plotics software to generate a graph of usage of our dial-in modems in use on our Portmaster.
  We are just a small ISP and I was looking for a program that would convert flat text files into graphs. Ploticus works perfectly. I've had it in use just a few hours now, so it remains to be seen how stable my setup is. And I'm also not a programmer, but I play around with script files once in a while.
  We are using v1.36 and have it installed under Linux. In case you're interested in seeing a live use by an ISP, you can take a look at:
  http://ns1.maineline.net/modemuse/howto.htm
  for details about how I used the software. The directory 'modemuse' is browsable and contains the daily .gif files generated by Ploticus. Comments on use would be kindly accepted.
  Thanks for a great piece of software.
  Steve Buza stevebuza@yahoo.com

  09 May '00
  After spending the better part of my afternoon playing with Ploticus, I just wanted to drop you a note and tell you how great I think it is. You've done outstanding work with it!
  Brian Fjeldstad bfjeldstad@hotmail.com

  18 Apr '00
  Hi Steve,
  Great product!! Has helped in automating our messaging usage data so we can stop using excel!
  Kenneth Meehan kenneth.meehan@bms.com

  17 Apr '00
  Nice program, but marketing isn't what it used to be.
  You need a poster emulating the old movie poster for "Spartacus!" that shows a gladiator holding up a full color graph with the caption:
  ... "I am Ploticus!"
  Tracy M. Johnson lucasvarity.com

  31 Mar '00
  I really like this program. It is well thought out and implemented.
  Thanks,
  Robert Fish rfish@mcqassociates.com

  24 Mar 00 - Hi Steve,
  per accident I heard of ploticus (from an HP employee reading Interact magazine, HP-UX section) when I was asking the HP3000 (MPE operating system) newsgroup for a tool like this on MPE ...
  Well, I'm working on Unix as well and had a similiar problem (how to produce out of data columns nice web based graphics readable by any kind of managers) and thought: give it a try anyhow.
  And I was deeply impressed ...
  and alrady today (after 1.5 days work) I finished my work to create automatically performance graphs out of HP MeasureWare for Web presentation on a monthly basis ...
  The ploticus is very simple I admit ... but it does exactly what I need. If you're interested in I'd like to send you the .p file I use, a graph, and probably the shell script I use to run this monthly via cron.
  IT"S REALLY GREAT!
  Now I'm looking for someone to port this to MPE as well ....
  I'm really interested in getting any news etc., especially that I also downloaded the web archive documentation. It is now part of our Intranet, mainly to ease the work for me ...
  Compliments: such a FREE powerful graphics S/W I've never seen before ...
  Lets' stay in touch, best regards,
  Andreas Schmidt, CSC, Germany aschmid4@csc.com

  10 Mar 00 - Greetings Steve:
  first off let me say I'm taking my first blow through your plotting utility and am quite pleased with what I see thus far. I'm looking to use it to automatically read in system performance data and generate output my browser can read. I'm bumping into a problem though...
  Hoehnke, Rick RHoehnke@talisman-energy.com

  12 Mar 00 - Hi -
  I saw the release of 1.35 and upgraded. I am well on my way to setting up a system to do a major technical report. The largest part of the report will be hundreds, possibly over a thousand plots.
  Here is how I am setting up to do it. I use SciLab to read the raw data files, do filtering, computation, data manipulation, etc. I write a data file containing the fields for a plot. Then I use the string handling capabilities of SciLab to compose a bash command line string for pl and then execute it with a system() call. This gives me a .ps file containing the plot complete with individual caption.
  I now have a LaTeX document started which places the .ps file in a figure enviornment, rotates it to landscape, reduces it (as may be required for various possible layouts).
  I already have scripts to run sets of raw data files through SciLab and Ploticus. My next step is to use these scripts to write the LaTeX commands for each figure so that I can build the .tex file automatically.
  My company, Industrial Analytics, is a 4 person outfit and we do not have time to do this stuff manually, or even to point and click through it. I am so pleased to be able to put together a set of freely available tools to automate the task. Oh, I almost forgot to mention, this all runs on a Linux box. I borrowed the disk from a friend. Computer, monitor, printer: a little over $1000.00.
  Ronald Michaels <michael@planetc.com>

  03 Mar 00 - Hello Steve,
  I have been playing around with some bar charts in Ploticus 1.34 - what a great piece of software. I can now help the kids with their homework a bit better <grin>.
  However, I have come across one problem...
  Tom Garner peterg@teleord.co.uk

  02 Mar 00 - Hi Steve,
  I am honored to be included in your 'rogues' gallery. Ploticus is still my favorite 'freshmeat' software and I have great fun outdoing so called professional graphics products. (Both in speed and looks).
  But I seem to have run into a little problem...
  Scott Ostrander ostrande@berbee.com

  28 Feb 00 - Hello Steve.
  I distilled your PS manual to PDF as one file. I've enclosed it in case you think other users would find it useful. I'm investigating use of your package for securities analysis.
  Michael S. Muegel
  mike@muegel.org

  20 Feb 00 - Hi Steve--
  First off, I can't begin to tell you how cool it is that you have made ploticus available and shared the sources.
  In setting it up as part of our intranet (on a redhat 5.2 box), I came up with this strategy for making a ploticus graphing server in perl with no temporary files, piping data scripts to stdin and catching the gif output = on stdout.
  Tom McClure

  22 Feb 00 - Steve,
  Thank you very much for your prompt reply, and for even providing me a working example ! (Clearly you are a gentleman *and* a scholar ...)
  I feel I owe you at least a little more in the way of my interest in Ploticus given your considerate reply:
  Ploticus seems to me to be one of the few animals that can properly grok time series data; I used to use the ISSCO Tell-A-Graf package on an IBM mainframe in my "aerospace engineer" days to handle data of this type.
  I also have interest in the R language (open source) technical computing environment, which also shows some promise for decent visualization and analysis capabilities. (This is a near functional equivalent to the S or S-plus language for statistics designed by Bell Labs and/or sold through MathSoft.) If you've had any experience with it, I'd love to know your impression of it.
  My company is an energy procurement consulting firm, and we deal with lots of time series data relating to various dynamic market pricing, as well as profiles of customer energy consumption. Our need for visualization and presentation tools is growing very rapidly. (I only wish Ploticus was available as a Win 9X port so I could give it a spin prior to acquiring Linux.)
  Thanks again for your reply; if you're ever interested in working in the greater Buffalo, NY area, I hope you'll drop me a note -- I'm sure your talents could be put to strategic use here at LepCorp!
  Regards,
  Mike Mastroianni mjmalpha@localnet.com

  21 Feb 00 - Steve,
  If you have a moment, perhaps you could answer a brief question re your Ploticus package ?
  I've been looking for a good script-driven scientific plotting package for a long time w/ the ability to plot data where, for example, the X-Y data are of the form:

      10/12/2000 00:00,  22.57
      10/12/2000 05:22. 19.64
      10/13/2000 23:10, 17.98

  Can Ploticus handle this in a properly-scaled fashion ?
  If so, I will probably have to get Linux running here on a workstation :) Thanks in advance for any light you might shed on my problem ...
  Mike Mastroianni mjmalpha@localnet.com

  17 Feb 00 - I've gotten ploticus to compile on the Cobalt Qube (the cool little MIPS linux box with a glowing alien green light in the front). It didn't compile right out of the box because of a few differences.
  1) No PNG libraries (hey, I was lazy and didn't need them anyway)
  2) No X11. At All. (these boxes don't have a keyboard or monitor)
  [...] Then I did a "make pl" because plpng wasn't happy without libpng. It seems to work. Thought you might like to know.
  Dan DeMaggio dmag@wellersoft.com

  15 Feb 00 - Steve,
  Ploticus is an excellent package. I've been playing with it and it is well above standard for freeware packages. I am using pl version 1.34 on Sun6.
  James Walker
  jwalker@wham.com

  10 Feb 00 - Hi Steve.
  First, I'd like to thank you for writing ploticus. It's much more flexible and easier to use than anything else I've seen. I love it, and I'm thinking of distributing it with a web-based medical program I've written (with appropriate credit, of course!) I also appreciate the excellent handbook and all those examples.
  P.S.- I would love to have more 'auto' features, since I generate the plots on-the-fly. For example, I'm generating a history graph (X=3Ddate, = Y=3DDose). Sometimes I'm graphing a few days, some times it's over a few years.=20 Currently, I have a perl program decide if the label should be 'Mmm' (if I'm graphing less than 1 year) or the month label should only be 'M' (for more than a year). I know, I know, adding heuristics to your program to "do the right thing" is hard. But I can ask, can't I? :) By The way, the autoyear function is great. Heck, the whole program is great.
  Dan DeMaggio dmag@wellersoft.com

  10 Feb 00 - Can I convert the Ploticus Programm to a windos platform? Or did you know something about a Programm like Ploticus running under Windows (I already run GNUPLOT but it doesn't do what I want)?
  Thanks a lot
  Andreas Andreas.Dangel@AQUA-Institut.de

  9 Feb 00 - Greetings Steve!
  My name is Garry Bryan and I'm a contract System Administrator currently on assignment with a large manufacturer in the southeastern U.S. . Several months ago I was tasked ( okay, it was more like blu dgeoned) to automate system performance reporting using "free" software for the group of Unix ( HPUX ) boxes I am involved with at their site.
  After fumbling around for a while, I found Ploticus. I am currently putting the finishing touches on the whole process producing the charts for monthend and I'm pleased to say that everything is going well( Am I long-winded or what?).
  Thanks for your time and for a great piece of software!
  Garry G. Bryan cradh@ix.netcom.com

  8 Feb 00 - Hi Steve -
  I found Ploticus about a month ago, just as an accident. It filled a need which I had. I am now using Ploticus from within Scilab as the engine to print out data plots. I get very nice looking plots with more control than the native plotter in Scilab. I now drink coffee while my computer slaves away on a shell script.
  It took me about 4 hours on a Saturday (cold and wet outside) to get just what I wanted. Thanks very much for taking the time to make your hard work available.
  Ronald Michaels michael@planetc.com

  8 Feb 00 - God bless sourcecode, without it I would never have thought about trying smaller farouts :) It would benefit from some additional comments though ;)
  Robert Linden robert.linden@postcom.deutschepost.de

  8 Feb 00 - Greetings SG.
  I have just downloaded the ploticus source, built and installed, and am perusing the html doco with a goofy grin on my face.
  After 20 years in the biz I have suffered through more plot packages than you can shake a stick at, and at first glance ploticus looks like very high-quality work. The sample plots conform to my own philosophy (influenced by Tufte): cut the BS, icing, or Disney factor (whatever you like to call it), and just present the data cleanly and simply.
  I have an immediate need for plot-to-PNG via cgi (not Perl, Tcl -- relatively unsung for cgi scripting but quite ideal). Ploticus looks like just the right toolkit for the job.
  I'm tremendously impressed by the quality of your online doco, cleanliness of build (even without gnu configure), and the quality & quantity of the examples.
  Applications here are many and varied, ranging from the web-based presentation of slitmask designs to (a private for-fun project) the presentation of local transit district routes and bus stops via instant customized maps... I foresee great fun with ploticus -- if we do anything particularly amusing with it, I'll drop you a line.
  thanks for so many hundreds of hours of thoughtful and meticulous work. much appreciated.
  De Clarke de@ucolick.org

  30 Jan 00 - Steve,
  I'm playing with your wonderful program and most things I tried work fine. But I live in Russia and would like to plot time data which are in Russian. I did obvious changes in dates.c and modified stock.csv but without success - running pl -x11 stock.html produces errors...
  Oleg Bartunov oleg@sai.msu.su

  19 Jan 00 - Hello Steve,
  I've been using ploticus off and on for about 2 months now. Typically plotting statistical data from our ADSM backup accounting log. We are using this to trend growth and plan expansion. Recently some client or clients are out of control and using too much space. I would like to graphically display the data..
  O, in case you are interested, RedHat 6.1 and I typically build a ploticus "template" file and then use a ksh script to modify the template and drive the output.
  Thanks for a great application!
  Scott Ostrander ostrande@berbee.com

  21 Jan 00 - Hi!
  ploticus is great software!
  Pablo Marques PMarques@herald.com

  15 Jan 00 - I am thinking about using ploticus as an alternative to gnuplot. I like the flexibility in using colors and linestyles in ploticus.
  Wenshui gan wgan@alumni.caltech.edu

  11 Jan 00 - FYI, I found ploticus at linuxberg, where I was looking for a non-interactive graph-package to be used for statistics-display on the web. I'm at the moment trying to estimate if it does our job, and it seems it does, it looks very powerful.
  Robert Linden robert.linden@postcom.deutschepost.de

  28 Dec 99 - I downloaded Ploticus 1.31 and have run into a problem with autoscale. I think I've found a solution, and wanted to let you know about it [..] If I'm missing something and this isn't a bug, please let me know! Otherwise, I hope this helps to improve your product, which looks like it should be really nice!

  P.S. In case you're curious, I'm trying to see if Ploticus would be a good replacement for Gnuplot in some of our data analysis scripts (eg: to monitor web hits, etc). It seems to be a lot more flexible than gnuplot, but also requires a lot more hard-coded controls -- in other words, in Gnuplot I can get a pretty graph with almost no work at all: "plot 'datafile' using 1:2 with lines" will get me a nice graph with a legend, autoscaled axes, etc. In ploticus, I need 15-20 lines of scriptfile to accomplish the same thing (creating axes, legend, setting scales, reading data, etc). Do you think in the future Ploticus might have a "sensible defaults" kind of mode, where it can figure these things out for itself? Or is that not really the Ploticus' purpose in life?

  In any case, thanks for developing it and making it available!
  Michael Fischer mfischer@aol.net

  22 Dec 99 - I read through your license agreement. Would it be acceptable if I were to make modifications which I submitted to you to be added to your software? I don't plan on modifying the code, just curious if it would be "legal".
  Jeff Richards Jeff_Richards@shawinc.com

  7 Dec 99 - First of all, thanks for creating ploticus. I've been using it for quite some time now, and I really appreciate it.
  Mark Smeets
  msmeets@pcl-hage.nl

  3 Dec 99 - I downloaded your Ploticus 1.31 software for linux some days ago. First, it's really a great peace of software, this is what I was searching for for a long time, thank you for giving it away for free!
  Andreas Widmann widmann@rz.uni-leipzig.de

  1 Dec 99 - I have used the combination of grap -> gpic -> groff to do my graphs, but that combination does not support colors and is missing features like having the x axis as dates or time. I have had to convert dates to a linear time and have different labels and x axis units. That is always a pain when the months are of different lengths. Ploticus seems to fit my needs perfectly.
  Goran Larsson hoh@approve.se

  1 Dec 99 - Hello. I just downloaded ploticus 1.3 to try it out. The program is very well documented and the HTML version of the manual is very easy to navigate around in. I did find some minor problems [...].
  Goran Larsson hoh@approve.se

  19 Nov 99 - I've compiled Ploticus Version 1.31 with png on my AIX 3.2.5 machine. If you want the binaries I can send them. I'll try with HP-UX soon, if there is any interest.
  And, well, it's good!
  Thanks,
  luciano mannucci luke@nameron.smd.sublink.org

  17 Nov 99 - I'd be very glad to maintain a complete (unmodified) mirror of your Ploticus here at the Univ. of Technology Vienna, Austria, Central EU. So I'd kindy request your permission.
  I believe it would be very much appreciated by the clients here in Austrian Academic Area to have such a useful tool available locally.
  Antonin Sprinzl Antonin.Sprinzl@tuwien.ac.at

  16 Nov 99 - Ploticus seems nice. It is a little low-level, and could benefit from a layer on top of it to more automagically create output types.
  Michael D. Beynon Department of Computer Science
  beynon@cs.umd.edu

  6 Nov 99 - I used ploticus to do a pie chart for an academic paper which has now been submitted. Im working on other stuff at the moment, including xfig whose author I have also been corresponding with. I currently see a need for a graphics package in which users can draw images and enter usable meta data on the images. For instance, a person could draw a map of roads and then associate data about those roads, like the grade, speed limit, etc. The same could be true of architectural drawings, etc.
  marc
  bumble@dclink.com

  29 Oct 99 - thank you for providing your very useful ploticus package!

  Dr. Dirk Melcher
  Dirk.Melcher@usf.Uni-Osnabrueck.DE

  30 Sept 99 - I liked IPL and I like Ploticus even better.

  Jim Arnott
  jarnott@bridge.com

  25 Sept 99 - Congratulations on writing ploticus and thanks for sharing it with us. Your program is really cool. Until now I was doing this kind of stuff with gnuplot and/or Chart-0.99 (with perl). Doing it with ploticus makes the charts come out really faster.
  Sotiris Vassilopoulos BetaTech, Inc. - Athens, Hellas
  svas@mail.ariadne-t.gr

  25 Sept 1999 - Some feedback (no flames intended).

  I took a look at your package, and I liked it. However, the license is too strict for me, especially the following clause: ``Permission is granted to MODIFY the SOURCE CODE, however, modified code may not be distributed to others*.''

  In my opinion, this leaves open the possibility that, sooner or later, you decide to make the code proprietary, after which all contributors loose their efforts. Therefore, I will not use ploticus, and certainly not contribute to it. But I do respect your standpoint.

  Best regards,

  Herman Bruyninckx

  23 Sep 1999 - I am now attempting to use the ploticus package for plotting my academic research pie charts. Thanks alot for pointing it out. I'm installing it on my Linux box at home. [...]

  I haven't successfully finished with it yet so I don't know if it will work. The Perl5 Charting package created pie charts with the labels smashed one on top of the other. I think your package with its stand-offs will be much more successful. Thanks again. I very much appreciate it. It looks like a great package.
  marc
  bumble@cse.psu.edu

  21 Sept 1999 - Haven't tried it yet but certainly will the samples gallery looks awesome would appreciate infor on updates etc to
  paehler@gol.com
  data display engine
  Copyright Steve Grubb

  Markup created by unroff 1.0, `` `` June 18, 2001.