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I was trying to find out where this suddenly came from and how this related to gnuplot. A few sentences from the submitter on why this is news and why we shoul
by static_noise 10y ago
I was trying to find out where this suddenly came from and how this related to gnuplot.
A few sentences from the submitter on why this is news and why we should care would be in order.
- brudgers 10y agoI suppose the submission seemed intellectually interesting. That's the criteria for Hacker News and something that differentiates it from many other aggregators.
- smartmic 10y agoI discovered plotutils lately while learning BRL-CAD, a very old but powerful CAD system. There is a command to export views to UNIX plot files which I did not know up to now. An it seems powerful enough for quite a lot use cases. The metafile format allows for very flexible, generic 2D drawings whereas gnuplot is specialized to 2D/3D diagrams. BRL-CAD extended it for 3D drawings: https://manned.org/libplot3/ff1ca6c1 https://manned.org/libplot3/ff1ca6c1 I like several things about this discovery: * easy conversion to PNG, SVG * actually an alternative to SVG, using idraw * can directly translate from the PIC language without troff. The PIC mini language is a perfect fit (at least for me) to draw simple graphs, flow charts etc. Yes, it is old, but sometimes I prefer mature proven UNIX tools to fancy new web based applications with questionable privacy statements.
- ChuckMcM 10y agoAnd this is exactly right, popping out some PIC code is "easy", no need to figure out Cairo or Webkit or some third party graphics API, pipe it into plot and boom, picture.
- kevin_thibedeau 10y agoGnuplot is, despite its unfortunate name, not a GNU project program and not GPL licensed. The GNU plotutils are.