libraries for plotting

[Andreas Dietrich]

On Thu, 3 May 2001 15:09:31 -0300, Walter Moreira <walterm at cmat.edu.uy> wrote:
>Hello, Python people.
>
>I was browsing the Plotting resources section on Python.Org and there are some
>broken links (pgplot, plplot, ppgplot). What package do you suggest me for
>plotting? It looks that there are many but some are small or not manteined any
>more. I found Biggles on Parnassys but didn't try it yet.
>DISLIN looks good, but it is not free :-(

I think i have tried all the major plotting libraries that provide python
bindings.

dislin (you already found it). Has most features one could desire from a
plotting lib, but its API is quite bizarre and
non-orthogonal, and requires some work to get good looking plots. Supports
2d and 3d plots and its documentation seems to be complete.

plplot (http://plplot.sourceforge.net/) Is under active development, has a
helpful mailing list, and enough features (2d and 3d). Output quality and
speed is ok. I recommend it for non-interactive usage.

biggles (http://biggles.sourceforge.net/) has a nice object oriented api,
but only supports 2d plots and is _very_ slow (my plots took up to five
_minutes_ compared to five seconds with dislin). Has a lot of potential, but
cannot yet compare to the alternatives. (Maybe ok for web graphs)

pgplot (http://www.astro.caltech.edu/~tjp/pgplot/). This one i didn't quite
like (no 3d plots to begin with), but is one of the two plotting libs, that
_is_ useable for interactive work. This is because pgplot (under X11) puts
redrawing work into a separated process.

Gnuplot.py (http://gnuplot-py.sourceforge.org) This is my favorite for
interactive work. Has a sane object oriented interface and professional
output quality via gnuplot's latex terminal ;-) Does not yet wrap all of
gnuplot's features but has an easy way to pass commands to it.

hth. Andreas

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