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Ask HN: What's a good open-source plotting tool?

1 points by sendos 15y ago

I love Matlab's plotting functionality, and its open-source clone (Octave) has horrible plotting capabilities. Any other tools out there? How good is something like SciPy for this sort of thing?

dmlorenzetti 15y ago
I use R (www.r-project.org/) and am generally happy with its plots. The graphing commands have a few quirks, and a lot of non-orthogonal inputs, but it lets you dig in and do things at a pretty low level, in case you want to fine-tune your graphs. One thing I remember fondly from Matlab days, that R isn't so good at, was the ability to grab a handle to a graph axis, and rescale the axis, without starting a new plot. R pretty much forces you to know, from the start, what limits each axis should have. A colleague uses SciPy and is similarly very happy. However, I can't speak about it from personal experience. I've used gnuplot (www.gnuplot.info/) for small tasks (one or two lines on an x-y plot). My general impression is I would find it too constricting for bigger jobs. In particular, R allows me to do a full-fledged analysis and then plot results, while gnuplot pretty much requires you to generate the results externally.
huragok 15y ago
Try out jQplot (http://www.jqplot.com/ http://www.jqplot.com/)
bugsbunnyak 15y ago
matplotlib (python) is quite good: http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/gallery.html http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/gallery.html another python tool to consider is chaco: http://code.enthought.com/projects/chaco/gallery.php http://code.enthought.com/projects/chaco/gallery.php matplotlib is ideal for matlab-style iterative plotting. chaco is considerably faster (at least ~1 year ago) as it is specifically designed for creating interactive plots. if you need 3d graphics, consider the mlab library used in mayavi and some other projects. the commands are matlab-like, and it produces very nice graphics using vtk: http://github.enthought.com/mayavi/mayavi/auto/examples.html http://github.enthought.com/mayavi/mayavi/auto/examples.html

1 points by sendos 15y ago

I love Matlab's plotting functionality, and its open-source clone (Octave) has horrible plotting capabilities. Any other tools out there? How good is something like SciPy for this sort of thing?

dmlorenzetti 15y ago

I use R (www.r-project.org/) and am generally happy with its plots. The graphing commands have a few quirks, and a lot of non-orthogonal inputs, but it lets you dig in and do things at a pretty low level, in case you want to fine-tune your graphs. One thing I remember fondly from Matlab days, that R isn't so good at, was the ability to grab a handle to a graph axis, and rescale the axis, without starting a new plot. R pretty much forces you to know, from the start, what limits each axis should have. A colleague uses SciPy and is similarly very happy. However, I can't speak about it from personal experience. I've used gnuplot (www.gnuplot.info/) for small tasks (one or two lines on an x-y plot). My general impression is I would find it too constricting for bigger jobs. In particular, R allows me to do a full-fledged analysis and then plot results, while gnuplot pretty much requires you to generate the results externally.

huragok 15y ago

Try out jQplot (http://www.jqplot.com/ http://www.jqplot.com/)

bugsbunnyak 15y ago

matplotlib (python) is quite good: http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/gallery.html http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/gallery.html another python tool to consider is chaco: http://code.enthought.com/projects/chaco/gallery.php http://code.enthought.com/projects/chaco/gallery.php matplotlib is ideal for matlab-style iterative plotting. chaco is considerably faster (at least ~1 year ago) as it is specifically designed for creating interactive plots. if you need 3d graphics, consider the mlab library used in mayavi and some other projects. the commands are matlab-like, and it produces very nice graphics using vtk: http://github.enthought.com/mayavi/mayavi/auto/examples.html http://github.enthought.com/mayavi/mayavi/auto/examples.html