gracePlot.py

[Nathaniel Gray]

DeepBlue wrote:

> I checked your web site.  Quite some useful work there.  I have a question
> for you:
> Does gracePlot have any support for plotting in 3-D space?  

Grace is a 2-D only system.  In my experience 3-D plots are rarely useful for 
conveying actual, quantitative information, though they can be nice qualitative 
purposes.  They're also great for making screenshots for your plotting package. 
;-)  If 3-D plots are important to you you should check out SciGraphica (go 
google).  It's even got an embedded Python interpreter.  :-)  Unfortunately it 
also has a somewhat long dependency list and some other qualities that made it 
the wrong choice for my purposes.

gracePlot is IMHO quite good for quick, simple, 2-D plots with high-quality 
output both on the display and the printed page.  It's for when you're working 
with Numpy and say, "man, I wish I could just plot these points and see if they 
make sense," or, "I just need a simple plot with a legend, title, and axis 
labels to show at the next lab meeting."  If you need to do 3-D volume 
rendering with embedded vector fields then this is not the right package for 
you.

That having been said, though, I should point out that Grace, and by extension 
gracePlot, does what it does quickly, flexibly, and attractively.

> Also, can we
> export data points into csv files?

gracePlot just knows how to plot things.  Saving things is somebody else's job. 
 :-)  Seriously, though, you use gracePlot to get your data from Python to 
Grace.  You should be able to save to csv from Python with at most 5 lines of 
code, and from Grace you can save to, well, whatever formats Grace supports.

> How does it compare to GNUplot?

Gnuplot is an extremely full-featured plotting package, but it has no 
interactivity.  I want to be able to explore data by zooming in on different 
parts of curves using this crazy modern invention known as a "mouse", but 
there's no way to do that in gnuplot AFAIK.  If my title is wrong I just want 
to double click on it and change it, not start the whole plot over again.  The 
real competition to Grace IMO is SciGraphica, which I may do some work on in 
the future.

Understand that most of these questions pertain to Grace itself rather than my 
package, which is just a high-level wrapper for it.  Information about Grace 
can be had from their website: http://plasma-gate.weizmann.ac.il/Grace/

For those of you who missed it the first time, gracePlot.py can be obtained 
from my website:
        http://www.idyll.org/~n8gray/code/

Cheers,
-n8

-- 
Nathaniel Gray

California Institute of Technology
Computation and Neural Systems
--