<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"> <HTML ><HEAD ><TITLE >Graphics and Visualization</TITLE ><META NAME="GENERATOR" CONTENT="Modular DocBook HTML Stylesheet Version 1.7"><LINK REL="HOME" TITLE="Scientific Computing with Free software on GNU/Linux HOWTO " HREF="index.html"><LINK REL="PREVIOUS" TITLE="Numerical Methods and Libraries" HREF="numlib.html"><LINK REL="NEXT" TITLE="Programming systems for GNU/Linux" HREF="systems.html"></HEAD ><BODY CLASS="sect1" BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF" TEXT="#000000" LINK="#0000FF" VLINK="#840084" ALINK="#0000FF" ><DIV CLASS="NAVHEADER" ><TABLE SUMMARY="Header navigation table" WIDTH="100%" BORDER="0" CELLPADDING="0" CELLSPACING="0" ><TR ><TH COLSPAN="3" ALIGN="center" >Scientific Computing with Free software on GNU/Linux HOWTO</TH ></TR ><TR ><TD WIDTH="10%" ALIGN="left" VALIGN="bottom" ><A HREF="numlib.html" ACCESSKEY="P" >Prev</A ></TD ><TD WIDTH="80%" ALIGN="center" VALIGN="bottom" ></TD ><TD WIDTH="10%" ALIGN="right" VALIGN="bottom" ><A HREF="systems.html" ACCESSKEY="N" >Next</A ></TD ></TR ></TABLE ><HR ALIGN="LEFT" WIDTH="100%"></DIV ><DIV CLASS="sect1" ><H1 CLASS="sect1" ><A NAME="graphvis" ></A >6. Graphics and Visualization</H1 ><P ></P ><UL ><LI ><P > <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 > <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 > <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 > <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 > <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 > <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 > <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" > here </A >. </P ></LI ><LI ><P > <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 > <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 > <A HREF="http://www.gnu.org/software/plotutils/plotutils.html" TARGET="_top" > 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 > <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 > <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 > <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 ></LI ></UL ></DIV ><DIV CLASS="NAVFOOTER" ><HR ALIGN="LEFT" WIDTH="100%"><TABLE SUMMARY="Footer navigation table" WIDTH="100%" BORDER="0" CELLPADDING="0" CELLSPACING="0" ><TR ><TD WIDTH="33%" ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top" ><A HREF="numlib.html" ACCESSKEY="P" >Prev</A ></TD ><TD WIDTH="34%" ALIGN="center" VALIGN="top" ><A HREF="index.html" ACCESSKEY="H" >Home</A ></TD ><TD WIDTH="33%" ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" ><A HREF="systems.html" ACCESSKEY="N" >Next</A ></TD ></TR ><TR ><TD WIDTH="33%" ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top" >Numerical Methods and Libraries</TD ><TD WIDTH="34%" ALIGN="center" VALIGN="top" > </TD ><TD WIDTH="33%" ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" >Programming systems for GNU/Linux</TD ></TR ></TABLE ></DIV ></BODY ></HTML >
