Purpose: to discuss what '''plplot''' means .
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The name "plplot" appears to be associated with several items - I'm uncertain
at this time whether these are all derivatives of one another or all different.

Items 1,3 are effectively identical (now that the source trees are being merged, finally).  Item 2 should be pTplot.  Item 4 is an application which ''uses'' plplot (and there are many, many applications in that category, including 'R')
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 What: plplot
 Where: http://plplot.sourceforge.net/
        http://www.neosoft.com/tcl/ftparchive/sorted/packages-8.0/graphics/Plplot-src/4.99/plplot-src.tar.gz
 Description: Plplot is a GLPL'ed graphing and plotting package, containing
        much improved C++ and Tk (and incr Tk) integration compared to
        the old releases.  Can be used stand alone or on top of Cpptcl.
        Use of Cpptcl can allow access to the Tcl_Obj interface of Tcl and
        result in faster performance in some cases.  It also
        includes a stand alone Tcl matrix object.
        Binary versions of MacOS 8.1 and Windows NT are also available.
        Currently at version 5.1.0 .
 Updated: 09/2001
 Contact: mailto:vince@santafe.edu (Vincent Darley)

(This one should be "ptplot" ('t' not 'l'):

 What: plplot (ptolemy)
 Where: http://ptolemy.eecs.berkeley.edu/java/ptplot/
 Description: Java two dimensional plotter - alternative to xgraph or
        pxgraph.  Includes ptplot2mif.tcl to convert the output of
        ptplot to Framemaker MIF.
        Ptolemy hacker mailing list also takes questions on ptplot.
 Updated: 06/1998
 Contact: mailto:ptolemy-hackers-request@ptolemy.eecs.berkeley.edu
)

 What: PLPLOT
 Where: ftp://dino.ph.utexas.edu/plplot/distrib/plplot4p99i.tar.gz
        http://www.fas.harvard.edu/%7Edarley/pLTK.html
 Description: A scientific plotting package, containing a wide range of
        plot types and font characters.  It supports many different
        output device drivers.  The X driver is written in Tk.  It
        provides a full user interface, with zoom, pan, orient, etc.
        There is a Tk plotting widget as well.  The Plplot Tk widget has
        also been ported to work on Macintosh.
        Now requires Tcl/Tk 8.x.
        There is a plplot mailing list mentioned in the docs.
        Plplot uses the GNU licensing.
 Updated: 07/1999
 Contact: mailto:plplot-request@dino.ph.utexas.edu for mailing list.
        mailto:mjl@dino.ph.utexas.edu (Dr. Maurice LeBrun)


 What: Plotting widget for Tk
 Where: ftp://dino.ph.utexas.edu/pub/plplot/
 Description: The plotting widget is a part of PLPLOT,
        (see "part4").  Plplot uses the GNU licensing so be aware of this.
 Contact: mailto:plplot-request@dino.ph.utexas.edu for mailing list.
        mailto:mjl@dino.ph.utexas.edu (Dr. Maurice LeBrun)

 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:thiebaut@obs.univ-lyon1.fr (Eric THIEBAUT)

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Plplot is on sourceforge: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=2915

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/plplot5.1a.zip
Also see http://www.santafe.edu/~vince/Pltk.html for some screenshots.

[http://www.santafe.edu/~vince/pics/plDemo1.gif]

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

Plplot currently uses 'fopen' etc directly so will not work properly at accessing its library files from inside a scripted document.

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

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[Category Application] | [Category Package] | [Category Graphics]