Plplot

Purpose: to discuss what plplot means .

All development on the "plplot" library has moved to sourceforge. The older development hosted at 'dino.ph.utexas.edu' has been moved over, and that host is no longer valid. Therefore all 'plplot' information is centered at:

 What: plplot
 Where: http://plplot.sourceforge.net/
 Description: Plplot is a LGPLed graphing and plotting package, 
        containing much improved C++ and Tk (and incr Tk) integration 
        compared to the old releases.  
        It also includes a stand alone Tcl matrix object.
        Binary versions for MacOS 8.1 and Windows NT are also available.
        Currently at version 5.6.1
 Updated: 2006-05-29
 Contact: see plplot mailing lists on sourceforge for contact info (Dr. Maurice LeBrun)

The remaining items are applications which use plplot (and there are many, many applications in that category, including 'R').

People should feel free to add info about other applications that make use of plplot - the idea is to help people learn how they can leverage tools to greater productivity.

 What: TiM
 Where: http://www-obs.univ-lyon1.fr/%7Ethiebaut/TiM/TiM.html
        ftp://ftp-obs.univ-lyon1.fr/pub/thiebaut/TiM/tim4.0.tar.gz
 Description: TiM is a Tcl extension designed to process 2 dimensional
        arrays of binary data (referred to as a matrix).  Think of it is
        a MatLab-like Tcl extension.  Provies arithmetic operations on
        matrices, transformations, various data types, ability to read and
        write binary data in little or big endian byte order, ability
        to write image file formats with or without automatic compression,
        plot drawing (with PLplot), and various other image manipulation
        procedures.
 Updated: 02/1997
 Contact: mailto:[email protected] (Eric THIEBAUT)

Plplot is on sourceforge: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=2915 but a better place to get started is its project page .

PLplot is relatively small, portable, freely distributable, and is rich enough to satisfy most users. It has a wide range of plot types including line (linear, log), contour, 3D, fill, and almost 1000 characters (including Greek and mathematical) in its extended font set. The package is designed to make it easy to quickly get graphical output; only a handful of function calls is typically required. For more advanced use, virtually all aspects of plotting are configurable.

Both ordinary tk widgets and some embedded widgets (which require Itcl) are provided.

A binary compile of an extension for WinTk is available here: ftp://ftp.ucsd.edu/pub/alpha/tcl/extensions/ Also see http://www.santafe.edu/~vince/Pltk.html for some screenshots. A scripted document containing 19 nice demos is here: ftp://ftp.ucsd.edu/pub/alpha/tcl/extensions/plplotter.kit (only contains compiled dll for Windows, you'll need the sources to compile this for unix/mac). NB, both of these define the 'Plplotter' package (not 'Plplot'), for a variety of reasons.

The graphing widget ("plframe") is double-buffered and redraws itself if you resize the widget. One can also zoom in on small areas of the plot.

The cvs distribution contains many examples (in examples/tcl and examples/tk) which work well with this binary release.

Plplot now reroutes all file i/o to Tcl (if desired) and therefore can make use of vfs support and so will work from inside a scripted document (it contains a number of support files for drawing numerous glyphs and world maps which it wants to load -- hence the need to reroute i/o to Tcl).

Vince was responsible for making Plplot work with Tk cross-platform.

AM (15 august 2008) Currently, I am one of the developers/maintainers of PLplot. While most of my work has been focused on the Fortran bindings and the Windows platform (native Windows, Cygwin and MinGW), now the time has come to pick up the Tcl and Tk bindings, as they have been receiving little attention these past couple of years.

AM (22 november 2013) I am currently working on an update of the Tcl/Tk bindings. My ultimate goal is to make a PLplot widget so that a PLplot graph can be easily added to a Tcl/Tk GUI. Right now the bindings can be used on Linux and Windows (plain Windows, MinGW and Cygwin), not sure about the status on OSX, for the simple reason that I have no access to that platform. They work best with Tcl - with Tk there is some interference with the windowing started by wish.