| Icarus Sparry 2007-12-30, 1:38 am |
| On Sat, 29 Dec 2007 12:47:44 -0800, Glenn MacGougan wrote:
> http://plot2d.sourceforge.net
> "
> plot2d -f plot2d_options.txt
> USAGE: Plot2D -h // display help USAGE: Plot2D -c
> <option file name> // create a default options file USAGE: Plot2D -f
> <option file name> // create plot based on this file
> /srv/www/htdocs/upload/result.bmp generated. "
> Check it out. It's still in Alpha so it needs design feedback.
From a "unix" point of view, if I was going to use this, there are
several things I would like changed.
1) You have to edit the options file to change the input and output files.
One would expect that the program would read standard input for its data
at least, and would write to standard output. By all means have command
line options that override these, but do not expect us to have to write a
program to edit the options file.
2) It is not clear how much the program can infer without the options.
For instance if you have an options file that just specifies the input
and output filenames will it produce a reasonable graph? If it doesn't,
then that makes the program a lot less useful to me. If it does, then
once you have go rid of the requirements to specify the input and output
files (point 1), then you can loose the options file.
3) Why restrict the output to a ".bmp" file? For instance on a system
using X why not have it able to pipe the output into 'xwud', or be able
to output techtronix 4014 escape sequences so the output can be viewed
using xterm? Why not have it capable of drawing simple ASCII art graphs?
4) Why does the data have to be "column based". I gave it a data file
which contained "1 2 3 4" and didn't get a very useful graph. I then put
the numbers one per line, and the program objected - "Problem in
attempting to plot series 0".
5) Why would I want a graph drawing library to calculate mean and
standard deviation? I am sure you have a particular need that you are
hoping this program will fill, but I can't see such a need for myself.
> Does anyone know if there is another way to do this from the shell?
> aside from some crazy way to script using octave and gnuplot.
>
> glenneo
Your idea of "crazy" may not agree 100% with the definition that the
other six and a half thousand million people that share the planet with
you use. 10th Edition Unix at least has the "plot" command, which could
be driven by an awk script to draw graphs. There are other graphics
libraries out there, e.g. www.libgd.org. which can be called from
interfaces from scripting languages.
I have not needed to do this myself, but I expect you can use the
spreadsheet in OpenOffice to do this kind of drawing as well.
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