-
Gnuplot 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.
-
NCAR Graphics 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.
-
OpenDX 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.
-
Gri: 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 article in The Linux Journal. Go to the gri home page if you are now impressed by it
and check out download info and manuals.
-
MayaVi: A scientific data visualizer written in Python. It is distributed under the
BSD license. The screenshots look promising. Check out the above link for more details.
-
PGPLOT: 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 PGPLOT Users Manual
-
PLplot: 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 here .
-
Grace 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.
-
SciGraphica 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.
-
Plotutils: 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.
-
DISLIN 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.
-
ImLib3D 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.
-
Ptplot: 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.
