[XeTeX] OT: creating beautiful graphs

[Bernhard Barkow]

Hi,

On 25.01.2006, at 07:21, Faisal Moledina wrote:
> Hey everyone,
>
> This is somewhat off-topic from XeTeX.  I assume that most, if not  
> all, the member on this list are Mac users, and I'm calling out to  
> those who regularly have to plot data to include in their XeTeX  
> documents.  I regularly have to plot data for lab reports and I  
> have in the past done so in the most cumbersome method possible.  I  
> would plot the data in Excel, then decrease the margins of the  
> graph, then print the graph to PDF, and then include the graph into  
> my XeTeX document.  I was wondering if there was a nice Mac program  
> that plotted data very well.  I have used Grapher, but only to plot  
> known equations, not raw data.  I was thinking of using either  
> Octave or MATLAB but I don't necessarily want to use a heavyweight  
> program just to plot some data.  What do you all use?

I definitely recommend Gnuplot. You can install it via fink or  
following the instructions at
http://www.lee-phillips.org/info/Macintosh/gnuplot.html  ("Here it is").
The official Gnuplot page is at
http://gnuplot.sourceforge.net/
Its front-end is not very fancy (just command-line, plots in a  
separate window), but it is very fast, reliable, and lets you do  
impressive things with data from files (or functions) (I've been  
using it for years, but still keep finding new features...).
When using Aquaterm output instead of X11, pdf export can simply be  
done by "Save as...", otherwise via the command line, which offers  
good batch capabilities, too.

Regards,
Bernhard


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_________________________________ Bernhard Barkow __
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