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>6. Graphics and Visualization</H1
><P
></P
><UL
><LI
><P
>&#13; <A
HREF="http://www.gnuplot.info"
TARGET="_top"
>Gnuplot</A
>
Gnuplot is a command-line driven interactive function plotting
utility. It handles both curves (2 dimensions) and surfaces (3
dimensions). Surfaces can be floating in the 3-d coordinate space,
or as a contour plot. For 2-d plots, there are also many plot
styles, including lines, points, lines with points, error bars,
and impulses. Graphs may be labeled with arbitrary labels and
arrows, axes labels, a title, date and time, and a key. It has
multiple plotting capabilities too. It allows saving the graphs in
various formats which can be included in word processors.
It can be used to generate publication quality plots.
</P
></LI
><LI
><P
>&#13; <A
HREF="http://ngwww.ucar.edu"
TARGET="_top"
> NCAR Graphics </A
>
A very popular graphics package which is very well documented and widely
used. It provides basic ingredients for creating complex plots as
functions / routines that can be called from Fortran and C. There is
a contributed programming interface to the NCAR Graphics package:
NCL (NCAR Command Language). The programming interfaces provide access
to complex graphics utilities like contouring, world map projections,
and velocity vectors. For the most part, the C interface is built on
top of the Fortran interface... It is distributed under the GNU public
license. Click <A
HREF="http://ngwww.ucar.edu/ngdoc/ng4.2"
TARGET="_top"
>here</A
>
for going to the documentation of all its various components.
</P
></LI
><LI
><P
>&#13; <A
HREF="http://www.opendx.org"
TARGET="_top"
>OpenDX</A
>
A very good Open Source Data eXplorer. It can handle large amounts of data
and creates great visualizations. It was the tool I stumbled upon when
I wanted a free graphics routine to make 3-D plots and zoom-in, rotate,
and really eXplore the output Data from my codes. The downside is that
compiling from source is really challenging and getting started is a
difficult. However it has excellent documentation distributed with it
and once I started off it was the best tool I have ever used.
</P
></LI
><LI
><P
>&#13; <A
HREF="http://gri.sourceforge.net"
TARGET="_top"
>Gri:</A
>
It is a language for scientific graphics programming. The claim that Gri
is similar to LaTeX in the sense that both provide extensive power as a
reward for tolerating a learning curve seems exciting and I for one want
to check this out!! Check out the following
<A
HREF="http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=3743"
TARGET="_top"
>article</A
>
in The Linux Journal. Go to the gri home page if you are now impressed by
it and check out download info and manuals.
</P
></LI
><LI
><P
>&#13; <A
HREF="http://mayavi.sf.net"
TARGET="_top"
>MayaVi:</A
>
A scientific data visualizer written in Python. It is distributed under the
<A
HREF="http://www.opensource.org/licenses/bsd-license.html"
TARGET="_top"
>BSD
license</A
>. The screenshots look promising. Check out the above link
for more details.
</P
></LI
><LI
><P
>&#13; <A
HREF="http://www.astro.caltech.edu/~tjp/pgplot"
TARGET="_top"
>PGPLOT:</A
>
PGPLOT is a Fortran 77 or C callable subroutine package for drawing
scientific 2D and Simple 3D plots. One can call these routines during
runtime and redirect the output to a variety of devices at run time.
It is well documented and the full documentation is available at the
above site. It is Free for Non-Commercial Use. A user manual is available
online at <A
HREF="http://www.astro.caltech.edu/~tjp/pgplot/contents.html"
TARGET="_top"
>PGPLOT
Users Manual</A
>
</P
></LI
><LI
><P
>&#13; <A
HREF="http://plplot.sourceforge.net/"
TARGET="_top"
>PLplot:</A
>
This is a library of scientific plotting functions that can be called from
C, C++, FORTRAN, TCL, PYTHON. PLplot features as described in the above link
are, "It can be used to create standard x-y plots, semilog plots,
log-log plots, contour plots, 3D plots, mesh plots, bar charts and pie charts.
Multiple graphs (of the same or different sizes) may be placed on a single
page with multiple lines in each graph. There are almost 2000 characters
in the extended character set. This includes four different fonts, the
Greek alphabet and a host of mathematical, musical, and other symbols.
A variety of output devices are supported and new devices can be easily
added by writing a small number of device dependent routines". To download
click
<A
HREF="http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=2915"
TARGET="_top"
>&#13; here </A
>.
</P
></LI
><LI
><P
>&#13; <A
HREF="http://plasma-gate.weizmann.ac.il/Grace/"
TARGET="_top"
>Grace</A
>
Grace is a WYSIWYG 2D plotting tool for the X Window System and Motif.
Grace runs on practically any version of Unix. Grace is a descendant of
ACE/gr, also known as Xmgr. It is lisenced under the GNU public license.
This link also has a tutorial and download information.
</P
></LI
><LI
><P
>&#13; <A
HREF="http://scigraphica.sourceforge.net/"
TARGET="_top"
>SciGraphica
</A
>
SciGraphica is a application for data analysis and technical graphics.
It fully supplies plotting features for 2D, 3D and polar charts. The
aim is to obtain a fully-featured, cross-platform, user-friendly,
self-growing scientific application. It is free and open-source,
released under the GPL license.
</P
></LI
><LI
><P
>&#13; <A
HREF="http://www.gnu.org/software/plotutils/plotutils.html"
TARGET="_top"
>&#13; Plotutils</A
>:
The GNU plotutils package contains software for both programmers and
technical users. Its centerpiece is libplot.a powerful C/C++ function
library for exporting 2-D vector graphics in many file formats, both
vector and raster. It can also do vector graphics animations.
Besides libplot, the package contains command-line programs for
plotting scientific data. Many of them use libplot to export graphics.
</P
></LI
><LI
><P
>&#13; <A
HREF="http://www.dislin.de"
TARGET="_top"
>DISLIN</A
>
DISLIN is a high-level plotting library for displaying data as curves,
polar plots, bar graphs, pie charts, 3D-color plots, surfaces, contours
and maps.
</P
></LI
><LI
><P
>&#13; <A
HREF="http://ImLib3d.sourceforge.net"
TARGET="_top"
>ImLib3D</A
>
ImLib3D is an open source C++ library for 3D (volumetric) image processing.
It contains most basic image processing algorithms, and some more
sophisticated ones. It comes with an optional viewer that features
multi-planar views, animations, vector field views and 3D (OpenGL)
multi-planar.
</P
></LI
><LI
><P
>&#13; <A
HREF="http://ptolemy.eecs.berkeley.edu/java/ptplot"
TARGET="_top"
>Ptplot</A
>:
Ptplot is a 2D data plotter and histogram tool implemented in Java.
Ptplot can be used as a standalone applet or application, or it can be
embedded in your own applet or application.
</P
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